Elmira, May 10.
My Dear Mother:
Orion & Mollie wrote me from New York, very handsomely scared at the prospect of having to live on a rented farm. Mollie said her father would never rent them the farm for ten per cent of its value, because the dwellings on it are always good for a rental of close upon five hundred a year. Which I don’t believe—but I chose to seem to believe it, & therefore sent them but $700 to get out there & start business with—& reminded them that the $500 a year from the dwellings would easily support them. Mollie overshot her mark, that time. In trying to make a strong point against the possibility of renting the farm, she made a colossal one against the necessity of my having to support them there if they owned the place.1
I can’t give the language of their letters, but the spirit of them is, Don’t give up [buying]!—we are anxious to go, we are in a frenzy to go, we can’t, we don’t want to live anywhere but on that farm! We’ll be entrirely happy & contented there & be rejoiced to work hard & compel success!
So I clinched the thing at once, with a check for $700 & another for $200 to meet the first payment [ of on ] the purchase with. They will remain in their present confident spirit about two weeks—but better that n than never have any pluck. I did a very disagreeable thing, too, but it seemed the wise course. I wrote them to furnish their house with the very cheapest stuff they could find, & with no fun pretentious flummery about it.—be chicken farmers & not hifalutin fine folks; put on no airs till they earned the wherewithal to do it with; eschew fine clothes; sell their Hartford furniture as being too high-toned for their circumstances; in a word, to banish the American sham of “keeping up appearances.” I told them to buy no horse & wagon till the farm needed it, not themselves. In fact I gave them a lot of advice which none but children ought to need, but which they richly need, & which will make Mollie rip & tear, no doubt—as the archangel said to Moses.2
It was necessary advice, & I don’t care how much of a row it makes if it only works a reform. Nobody can dress as Mollie does & look like anything but a fool, on a chicken farm. But she would go on dressing just so, if she were let alone—& then everything about her would have to be in keeping, of course, & there is where has lain the reason that they have ne‸ver‸ ed laid by a penny or paid a detbt.
Ma, I wish you would have them deed the farm to you instead of to me, and then maybe they would make an extra effort to meet the payments by & by & try to clear themselves of debt. I am but an injurious creditor for them, because they can but feel that any laxity toward me in ‸their‸ money obligations would not discommode me & therefore could not be a very rigid necessity. What they really need, for their own good, is a rigorous creditor, but we are not able to furnish them that, unfortunately.
We are all well & send love.
Yr son
Sam
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm. I
gave him $900 & he went to a ten-house village
2 miles above Keokuk on the river bank—this place was a
railway station. He soon asked for money to buy a horse &
light wagon,—because the trains did not run at church
time on Sunday, & his wife found it rather far to walk.
(9 Feb 79 to Howells, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:254)
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 141–142.
Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
buying • bu buying [corrected miswriting]
of on • ofn [‘f’ partly formed]
