To
Jane Lampton Clemens
and
Pamela A. Moffett
1 July 1878 • Heidelberg, Germany
(Transcript by Pamela A. Moffett: CU-MARK, UCCL 01575)
Schloss Hotel
Heidelberg July 1.
My dear Mother & Sister:
The letter came yesterday & we hope Sam will have a pleasant & profitable voyage. He can’t well fail to have a pleasant one, and if he cuts loose & paddles his own canoe boldly he cant fail to have a profitable one. I hope that in [France,] Germany & Italy he will go & board with people who know no English & make himself perfectly familiar with those languages. It will be cheap enough. Here on top a mountain called the Konigstuhl I hired quite a nice room to write in for five dollars a month, the family to teach me German, & presently found that they imagined they were to lodge me & furnish me my meals also! And not only that but there were signs that they considered $5 a month for boarding, lodging & teaching a man a month a pretty liberal remuneration. A tailor here made me a suit of clothes for $18 which would have cost me $75 in N. Y. Seven years ago I wanted Orion to take up his permanent residence in Germany & I think I was wise. He might now be teaching [German] pupils [the English] language (75 cents an hour) & that added to $42 a month would make him independent. I think he could have learned this bloody language in a couple of years, but I should need a couple of centuries. At last I am content to read it, & shan’t try to learn any great facility in speaking it. I do not think I could learn to speak even so simple a language as the French, now, notwithstanding I have read it, for amusement, for 20 years. Sometimes I think I couldn’t learn even so inconceivably simple & easy a language as English, if I hadn’t acquired it already.
[But] you must turn Sam loose on those 3 languages—he will speak them all like a native inside of 9 months—& I would rather possess that sort of intellectual property than any other that human science can furnish. Here Susie has been pelted with German only 2 months & yet chatters away in it now as if she were born to it. Yesterday Livy had to go after Susie to give the chambermaid an order in German. Bay has a high fever to-day, but the rest are well & send love to all the home folks.
Affly
Sam.
Textual Commentary
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MicroML, reel 7.
Provenance:See Moffett Collection in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
France, • France
German • german
the English • ‸the‸ English [Moffett’s correction of her transcription, not a revision by SLC]
[¶] But • [no ¶] But [paragraph begins flush left after a short line]
