To Joseph H. Twichell
12 December 1868 • Norwich, N.Y.
(MS facsimile: Davis, UCCL 02729)
(SUPERSEDED)

Norwich, N.Y., Dec. 12.

Dear Twichell—

Hip—hip—Hurrah! She just goes on “accepting the situation” in the most natural innocent, easy-going way in the world. She writes as if the whole thing were perfectly understood, & would no doubt be unpleasantly astonished to find if she only knew I had been regarding it differently & had been ass enough to worry about a cousin whom she merely gives the passing mention accorded to the humblest guests.1 She don’t know anything about beating the devil around the bush2—she has never been used to it. She simply calls things by their right names & goes straight at the appalling subject of matrimony with the most amazing effrontery. I am in honor bound to regard her grave, philosophical dissertations as love letters, because they probe the very marrow of that passion, but there isn’t a bit of romance in them, no poetical repining, no endearments, no adjectives, no flowers of speech, no nonsense, no bosh. Nothing but solid chunks of wisdom, my boy—love letters gotten up [ in on] the square, [flat-footed], cast-iron, inexorable plan of the most approved commercial correspondence, & signed with stately & exasperating decorum. “Lovingly, Livy L. Langdon”—in full, by the Ghost of Caesar! They are more precious to me than whole reams of affectionate superlatives would be, coming from any other woman, but they are the darlingest funniest love letters that ever were written, I do suppose. She gets her stateliness of English epistolary composition from her native dignity, & she gets that from her mother, who was born for a countess.

Hip—hip—Hurrah! I have badgered them & persecuted them until they have yielded, & I am to stop there for one day & night, on Dec. 17!

I am full of gratitude to God this day, & my prayers will be sincere. Now write me a letter which I can read to her, & [let] it reach Elmira a day or so before I get there—enclose it in an envelop directed to “Chas. J. Langdon, Elmira, N.Y.”3 Good-bye. My love to you all.

Yrs always—

Mark.

[in margin:] P.S. She knows you & Mrs. T. know all about [it. ]—she likes that.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Edward L. Marsh (see 28 Nov 68 to OLL, n. 2).

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2 Evidently a conflation of “beat about the bush” and “whip the devil round the stump,” meaning “to get round or dodge a difficulty or dilemma by means of a fabricated excuse or explanation” (Whitney and Smith, 2:1580).

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3 The same cautious procedure that Clemens himself used in writing to Olivia, here presumably to avoid alerting mail handlers that he was again visiting the Langdons.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, but in 1982 a photocopy was provided to the Mark Twain Papers by its owner, Chester L. Davis (1903–87), then executive secretary of the Mark Twain Research Foundation (now Chester L. Davis, Jr.), in Perry, Mo.

Previous publication: L2, 331–332; LLMT, 33–34.

Provenance:Twichell himself evidently returned to the Clemenses this and his 28 November 1868 letter, perhaps for sentimental reasons. This letter survived in the Samossoud Collection until at least 1947: sometime between then and 1949 Dixon Wecter saw the MS there and made a typescript of it. Davis evidently acquired the MS, by gift or purchase, directly from Clara Clemens Samossoud sometime after 1947 (see Samossoud Collection, pp. 515–16).

Emendations and textual notes:

in on • i on

flat-footed • flat-|footed

let • [possibly ‘lett’]

it. • [deletion implied]