To Olivia L. Clemens
8 or 9 August 1871 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00643)

[first two MS pages (about 187 words) missing]

it isn’t worth while to think about it or talk about it.

Don’t fear for us darling. If you are taken away I will love the baby & have a jealous care over [him. But ]let us hope & trust that both you & I shall tend him & watch over him till we are helped from our easy-chairs to the parlor to see his children married. Let us hope that way, sweetheart & try to trust that it will be so. In any case, you need not suffer any uneasiness about that influence you speak of. He shall never come under it. Better poison his body than his soul. Better make a corpse of him than a cur.

Livy dear, it is sad to think of your passing alone through these solemn anniversaries that are so fraught with memories of a happy time & a gracious presence; a noble heart, a beautiful spirit, a love only less than divine; a protecting arm, an unselfish a courage that quieted fear & brought repose, a sympathy so broad & general, & withal so strong & warm, that to possess it is to be that rare that thing, crea rare creation, that rare thing, that jewel of price, a Comforter.1

. . . .

Mrs. S. L. Clemens | Care Langdon | Elmira | N. Y [postmarked:] hartford [ct. ] aug 911 am [docketed by OLC:] 2 5th

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens probably wrote this letter soon after arriving in Hartford on 5 or 6 August. He replied to a letter in which Olivia mentioned the anniversary of her father’s death on 6 August 1870. The “influence” on Langdon Clemens has not been identified.

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2 Olivia had meticulously numbered Clemens’s courtship letters (see L3, 473–80). She had now begun a new sequence of numbers for the letters Clemens wrote since leaving Elmira on 2 or 3 August, the first four of which are lost (see the next letter). Only three letters to Olivia since their marriage and before the present letter are known to survive, all without dockets (6 July 70, 8 July 70, 12 Jan 71).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L4, 442; LLMT, 158.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

him. But • him.—|But

ct. • [ct] [badly inked]