To Olivia L. Langdon
28 November 1869 • Boston, Mass.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00380)

Boston, Sunday M.

Livy darling, I thank dear Mrs Susie very much for helping to get you ready to come to me. Anybody that helps in that is my good friend, & I in turn his humble servant. The day approaches, old fellow! Only nine weeks, & then—! Hurrah! Speed the day!

You are with Mrs. Brooks today, I suppose, & consequently happy. Tomorrow morning I shall telegraph her to know where you will be on Wednesday. If at her house, I shall stop at the Everett (or maybe at the Albemarle,) & run up & see you till noon, & then bid you good-bye until next day, for you would all be in bed by the time I got back from Brooklyn. But if you are at the St. Nicholas I shall stop there till 2 PM., & then you shall sit up & wait till I return from Brooklyn.1

Tomorrow evening at 6.30 I must run out to Newtonville, half an hour’s journey by rail, & lecture, returning here at 10 P.M.2 [ Tus Tuesday ]I shall run down to Thompsonville & talk till half past 8, & then trot along about an hour half an hour & sit up with Twichell at Hartford till after midnight, & then take a sleeping car for New York, arriving at 5 o’clock Wednesday morning.

This is your [birthday ]darling, & you are 24.3 May you treble your age, in happiness & peace, & I be with you to love you & cherish you all the long procession of years! I have kept this day & honored this anniversary alone, in solitary state—the anniversary of an event which was happening when I was a giddy school-boy a thousand miles away, & played heedlessly all that day & slept heedlessly all that night unconscious that it was the mightiest day that had ever s winged its viewless hours over my head—unconscious that on that day, two journeys were begun, wide as the poles apart, two paths marked out, which, wandering & wandering, now far & now near, were still narrowing, always narrowing toward one point & one blessed consummation, & these the goal of twenty-four years’ marching!—unconscious I was, in that day of my heedless boyhood, that an event had just transpired, so tremendous that without it all my future life had been a sullen pilgrimage, but with it a that same future was saved!—a sun had just peered above the horizon which should rise & shine out of the zenith upon those coming years & fill them with light & warmth, with peace & blessedness., for all time.

I have kept the day alone, my darling—we will keep it together hereafter, God willing. My own birthday’s comes Tuesday, & I must keep that alone also, but it don’t matter—I have had considerable experience in that.

Th Twichell gave me one of Kingsley’s most tiresomest books—“Hypatia”—& I have tried to read it & can’t. I’ll try no more. But he recommended Chas. Reade’s “Hearth & Cloister” & I bought it & am enchanted. You shall have it if you have not read it.4 I read with a pencil by me, sweetheart, but the book is so uniformly good that I find nothing to mark. I simply have the inclination to scribble “I love you, Livy” in the margin, & keep on writing & re-writing “I love you Livy—I love my Livy—I worship my darling”—& bless your dear heart I do love you, love you, love you, Livy darling, Livy mine—but it won’t do to write it in books where unsanctified eyes may profane it—& so, you see, sweetheart, there is nothing to mark.

Livy my precious sweetheart, I have received all your letters & my uneasiness is gone—got 4 in one day, & what a blessed feast it was! I was glad that it had happened so, since it brought so ample a pleasure.

I remember Miss Bateman—she was a gentle-looking little school girl of 12 or 13 when I used to see her in her front yard playing, every day.5

And now, if my child is [ tr tired ]reading this—which I am proud to say I don’t believe she is,—I will write some other letters. Thank goodness I shall kiss you, Wednesday, right on your blessed little mouth. And so good-bye, my own loved & honored Livy.

Samℓ.

Miss Olivia L. Langdon | 675 Fifth avenue | New York. [postmarked:] [boston ]mass. nov. 29. 5 a.m. [docketed by OLL:] 150th

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens planned to reach New York City on Wednesday morning, 1 December, so as to have time with Olivia before lecturing that evening in Brooklyn. Upon arriving, he registered at the Westminster Hotel and then, evidently on 2 December, moved to the St. Nicholas, presumably because Olivia was there (“Personal,” New York Tribune, 2 Dec 69, 5; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 3 Dec 69, 3). Olivia was now accompanied by her mother and, possibly, by her father, who was certainly there by the following week. Two of Clemens’s December letters indicate that he saw Jervis Langdon in New York during the first ten or eleven days of the month (see 10 or 11 Dec 69 to Colfax and 15 Dec 69 to JLC and family). In any event, Clemens was able to visit with Olivia before leaving for his 3 December lecture in Poughkeepsie and, after returning to New York City that night or the next morning, until he left for Philadelphia, where he lectured on 7 December. Jervis Langdon, if he already was in New York, probably made a brief trip home, to receive a prominent family friend: Anna E. Dickinson arrived in Elmira on the afternoon of 10 December, lectured that evening at the Opera House, and “as usual, during her stay in this city ... was a guest of Jervis Langdon, Esq.” (Elmira Advertiser: “City and Neighborhood,” 10 Dec 69, 4, 11 Dec 69, 4; “Anna Dickinson on ‘The Mormons,’” 11 Dec 69, 4).

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2 Clemens lectured on 29 November in the Congregational Church in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Although a church could be an inhospitable setting for a humorous lecture (see 13 and 14 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 2), that was not the case in Newtonville. There Clemens “elicited shouts of laughter. Three divines of the town were noticed as present, apparently in a most enjoyable frame of mind” (“Lectures,” Newton Journal, 4 Dec 69, 2).

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3 Olivia’s birthday was 27 November.

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4 Clemens’s library included both Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1862), about fifth-century Alexandria, and Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages (Chicago: M. A. Donahue and Company, n.d.). These novels were originally published in 1853 and 1861, respectively (Gribben, 1:373, 2:571).

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5 Olivia must have attended one of the final New York performances of British playwright Tom Taylor’s Mary Warner, with Kate Josephine Bateman (1843–1917) in the title role. On 27 November the melodrama, about a wife who confesses to a theft she believes her husband has committed, closed a run of six weeks at Booth’s Theatre. Bateman and her sister Ellen were already famous as child actors when their father, Hezekiah, brought them to St. Louis in 1855, where he managed the Pine Street Theatre until 1859. Clemens lived in St. Louis for the first six months of 1855. During that period he could have seen Kate Bateman, then almost twelve, “every day” while calling on his sister Pamela and her husband William A. Moffett, who were living on Pine Street between Fifth and Sixth streets—near the theater, on Pine between Third and Fourth, and probably near the Bateman residence as well. The 1855 St. Louis directory does not provide an address for Hezekiah Bateman and no directory was published the following year, but the 1857 directory lists him on Fifth Street, where he and his family also may have been living in 1855 (“Amusements,” New York Times, 19 Oct 69, 5, 7, 26 Nov 69, 5; L1, 46, 58; Ludlow, 526–27, 709; Knox, 133; Kennedy 1857, 20, 156).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L3, 412–414; MFMT, 18–19, excerpt; LLMT, 125–27.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.

Emendations and textual notes:

Tus Tuesday • Tusesday

birthday • birth-|day

tr tired • trired

boston • b [n] [badly inked]