Lockport, N. Y., Feb. 27.
Dear Mother—
I would have written you long ago, but about all of that “long ago” was spent in Elmira, & somehow I never could find time to write letters while there. All the time was exhausted in talking with Livy about the weather. The ring came safely to hand—& to us it will be a perpetual reminder of your goodness & your love, since your memory will always be pleasantly associated with it—it came safely to hand, & l Livy is manacled with it now, a hapless prisoner for life. She writes, “The ring continues to be the largest piece of furniture in the house, & so in company I am oppressively conscious of it.” She disposes her that hand in such awkward & unnatural positions that Hattie, always ready for any cussedness that offers, whispered the question in company, “if her shoulder was dislocated‸?”‸ —& Livy the conscious Livy blushed. I shall scalp Hattie yet, if she don’t go mighty slow. I forgot to tell Livy, but I have written her, that I promised you a large photograph to hang up in your library as a companion to mine—but I told her to hold on till I come, & I will “sit” her myself. In fact she ought to hold on till some time when she is in New York, for she has amply proved by sitting five times for a photograph for me that they can’t take even passable photographs in Elmira. I want her to look her best, because she isn’t as comely as she was a year ago. But she is just as lovely—she is every bit as good & lovely as Mrs. Severance,—which, I take it, is saying a good deal.1
You remark:
“I am lovely in the midst of confusion. Allie & my husband are gone, & I am reveling in dust & paint.”2
Why you are always lovely, Mother dear. I don’t say but what you are peculiarly lovely when you are in the midst of dust & confusion, but what I do maintain is, that in confusion or out of it you are always lovely. There, now—don’t that cheer you up?
Considering all things, I came out well enough with my appointments, notwithstanding my entanglements gave a power of dissatisfaction. I was in honor bound to go to Alliance from Ravenna, because in dismissing the Alliance audience the night I failed to appear, they had held on to the money, and had promised that the lecture should come off within a week. So I telegraphed Franklin that I would not be there till [Wednesday. I pai ] I paid Alliance their extra expenses, amounting to $20; I paid Franklin their extra expenses, amounting to $10—& then found that while I could have made Geneseo easily enough from Titusville, I couldn’t do it from Franklin. So I telegraphed them to stop the lecture & send my bill, which they did. I paid it—[ $22.5 $22.25]. So that out of those extras cost me $52 altogether, & over thirty ‸several‸ dollars extra traveling expenses, & four or five valuable days’ time—for I have to go to Geneseo at last, to satisfy those people. Alliance cost me much more than a hundred dollars, & only paid me eighty. But don’t you know that the hand of Providence is in it somewhere? You can depend upon it. I never yet had what seemed at the time to be a particularly aggravating streak of bad luck but that it revealed itself to me later as a royal piece of royal good-fortune. Who am I, mother, that I should take it upon myself to determine what is good fortune & what is evil? For about a week, Providence headed me off at every turn. The real object of it, & the real result, may not transpire till you & I are old, & these days are forgotten—& therefore is it not premature, now, to call it bad luck? We can’t tell, yet. You ought to have heard me rave & storm at a piece of “bad luck” [ wi which ] befel me a year ago—& yet it was the very individual means of introducing me to Livy!3—& behold, now am I become a philosopher who, when sober reflection comes, hesitateth to rail at what seemeth to feeble finite vision ill luck, conscious that “the end is not yet.”4
Yes I did receive your letter at Franklin—& answered it, too. 5—notwithstanding you think ‸that possibly‸ I have “soared beyond the reach of human sympathy at its need.” And I don’t forget, “in all my bright hours & in all my happiness” that you are my “faithful friend & Mother.” I should be a faithless ingrate to do such a thing. So far am I from it, that I remember you & recall you without effort, without exercise of will;—that is, by natural impulse, undictated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth ‸worth the‸ having. When we think of friends, & call their faces [out ] of the shadows y & their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, & do it without knowing why, but save that we love to do it, we may content [ out ourselves ] that that friendship is a Reality, & not a Fancy—that it is builded upon a rock, & not upon the sands that dissolve away with the a ebbing tides & carry their monuments with them.6
I shall reach Hartford about the 5th of March & go to work on the
book again—My address will be “148 Asylum street,
Hartford”—& on the 17th, if nothing happens, I shall arrive in
Elmira again, to stay a week [torn in order to cancel:]
[
[or] t[w]o[,] n[
do]
A[nd]
]
[two lines (about 15 words) torn away ] 7
I ought not to say anything about staying a week or two, either—for [ their there ] is a possibility that business will so hurry me that I may not even be able to stay a day or two. Whatever time I spend there will have to be taken from my visits in Cleveland & St. Louis on my way to [Califora. ], & my time is so cut down, now, [ the that ] there is scarcely any of it left. I had hoped to be in San Francisco by the end of March.
Remember me to all [the home ] folks, & receive thoug the love & the blessing of thy eldest son—
Sam
Did you see my Vanderbilt letter in the last issue of Packard’s Monthly?8
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
He is like a man which built a house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the
flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it; for it was founded upon a rock. But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built a house upon the
earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L3, 122–125; MTMF, 77–81; LaVigne, 6, brief excerpt.
Provenance:see Huntington Library, pp. 582–83.
Emendations and textual notes:
Wednesday. I pai • Wednesday.—| I pai
$22.5 $22.25 • $22.525
wi which • wihich
out • out | | out
out ourselves • outrselves
[or] t[w]o[,]n[ do]
A[nd]
•
[The conjectured first line of this suppressed passage (see p. 125, n. 7)
is based on the hypothetical reconstruction of the torn MS reproduced on p. 611.]
their there • theirre
Califora. • [possibly ‘Califora;’]
the that • theat
Letter of 27 and 28 February 1869 to Mary Mason Fairbanks. Surviving portion of MS page 8, with part of the first line Clemens tore away from it editorially reconstructed (CSmH).
