From Samuel L. and Olivia L. Clemens
to Jervis and Olivia Lewis Langdon
19 June 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00480)

llc

Buf. [ M ] June 19.

Dear Father & Mother:

We are all set & ready for you. Livy has been down town & bought a spring-lounge & a spring-mattrass to put on it & has set apart for its occupancy the place now occupied by the “awful short” lounge in the library. Father can lie there & talk think & be comfortable & never discommode either me, because I can lie just as comfortably standing up—all I want is a chance. Mother & Livy & I will endeavor to make the time glide along pleasantly—they all day, & I after 3 or 4 P.M. We are waiting & hoping for the telegram announcing your immediate dep departure for Buffalo.

We are rather too full for utterance, just now, either by pen or word of mouth—for Livy’s neighbor, Mrs. White sent us an ample dish of enormous strawberries of her own raising while we were at dinner a moment ago, & we are in a surfeit, now, from an [overdose ] of them. This is the pleasantest neighbor we have.1

Dr. Heacock leaves here, about next Wednesday or Thursday, to be gone a month—is going to swap pulpits with a Chelsea minister named Plum2—so I shall get a chance to go to Westmnister church for a while, Livy & other circumstances permitting. I am suffering for some good music. Our “congregational” singing grows steadily more & more atrocious—until I have got afraid to go there ‸to our church‸ when it storms, for fear our caterwauling will exasperate fear the lightning will strike it. Such music as we have is just tempting Providence & inviting calamity all the time.

Our shrubbery is coming along finely & attracting a good deal of attention. We have got one panzy in bloom, ‸(Indeed we had thirty two in bloom day before yesterday—Livy)‸ & one [rosebud ]straining itself awfully. But you can tell Mr. Slee that we are beginning to look upon our Irish Juniper as a failure. It looks like a fox-squirrel’s tail. The man told me it was an evergreen—I thought he [ f ] said that, but I guess maybe he really said it was a nevergreen.

Lovingly yr son

Samℓ.

Sue

We have a rose bush that has ever so many buds on it, it is a moss rose too— Be sure to come to us, don’t fail us— We have all our strawberries & pine apples canned. 11 ‸cans‸ of the former. 6 of the latter— We do want to see you.

Livy

Mr C. says 11 strawberries canned but it aint 11 berries it is eleven cans—

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The wife of either Henry G. White, a “House, Boat and Fresco Painter” who lived at 523 Delaware Avenue, on the same block as the Clemenses, or Erskine N. White, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church (mentioned in the next paragraph), who lived at 726 Delaware, adjacent to the church and about three blocks from the Clemenses (Buffalo Directory 1870, map, 17, 89, 114, 536).

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2 Albert H. Plumb, of Chelsea, Massachusetts, was one of several clergymen, all former parishioners of Heacock’s, who were in Buffalo on 12 June to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lafayette Street Presbyterian Church and Heacock’s ministry there (Buffalo Express: “Religious,” 11 June 70, 4; “Quarter Centennial,” 13 June 70, 5; Buffalo Commercial Advertiser: “Religious,” 11 June 70, 3).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L4, 153–154.

Provenance:donated to CU-MARK in 1972 by Mrs. Eugene Lada-Mocarski, Jervis Langdon, Jr., Mrs. Robert S. Pennock, and Mrs. Bayard Schieffelin.

Emendations and textual notes:

M • [partly formed]

overdose • over-|dose

rosebud • rosebrud

f • [partly formed]