To Mary Mason Fairbanks
24 September 1868 • St. Louis, Mo.
(Transcript: CU-MARK, UCCL 02752)

St. Louis, [Sept. 24]

[My Dear Mother—]

Yours of the 20th came to hand this morning, & I am glad enough to hear that my visit did not lessen me in your regard. I dimly feared the contrary. Don’t be afraid to write sermons—I am perfectly willing not only to receive them but to try to profit by them. Your advice about the building of the lecture I shall strictly follow. I shall try very hard to make it a creditable one. If diligent effort will do this I shall accomplish it. What I want, a hundred times more than “study,” is a cheerful day—an untroubled spirit. I hope for such a day.

I shall start day after to-morrow (Saturday) at 8 A.M., which will bring me to Cleveland Sunday morning. Then I will leave Cleveland Monday morning. I have some idea of spending Tuesday in Elmira—will talk with you.1

I have received a very jolly letter from Mr. Langdon & one from Charlie. Mr. L. was very low spirited when we saw him last.2

I have thought over & over again of writing that squib for the Herald, but I have not once been in a happy humor, & could not do it. There is [something ]in my deep hatred of St. Louis that will hardly let me appear cheery even at my mother’s own fireside. Nobody knows what a ghastly infliction it is on me to visit St. Louis. I am afraid I do not always disguise it, either.

I missed Mr. Fairbanks’s friend Cleland,3 in Chicago—couldn’t happen to catch him in. I was mighty busy in that town, too.

I wish Mr. Fairbanks would see that photographer & get my imperial-size pictures & hold them for me, till I come.4

I shall probably telegraph my approach from some point along the line of the railroad on Saturday [night.]

. . . .

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens evidently did leave St. Louis on the morning of 26 September, and stayed that same night with the Fairbankses. He proceeded to Elmira on 27 September, staying with the Langdons until the evening of 29 September, when he departed for New York (5 Oct 68 to Mary Mason Fairbanks; OLL to Alice B. Hooker, 29 Sept 68, CtHSD; “Mark Twain ...,” Elmira Advertiser, 30 Sept 68, 4).

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2 Jervis Langdon was suffering from stomach cancer, which would prove fatal in a little less than two years; at this time the gravity of his condition was still unknown.

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3 Cleland has not been identified. Clemens passed through Chicago while traveling from Cleveland to St. Louis.

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4 Clemens and Charles Langdon were photographed together by James F. Ryder during their visit to the Fairbankses; this picture is reproduced above. A second photograph of Clemens, dressed identically, was probably also taken at this time, although the extant print—reproduced as the frontispiece for this volume—was evidently ordered some years later when Ryder was at a different address. Both prints (now in CU-MARK) are “imperial-size”—roughly 4“×6”—rather than the smaller carte de visite size.

Clemens and Charles J. Langdon in Cleveland, September 1868. Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK). See p. 254 n. 4.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Transcript (handwritten in ink) made by Dixon Wecter of a TS copy of Clemens’s MS (both now lost), Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). Although Wecter wrote “(Fairbanks MS)” at the top of his transcript, he later referred to the document he copied as a “typescript” (see the emendation for 252.28 below).

Previous publication: L2, 252–254; MTMF, 37–38.

Provenance:Thomas Nast Fairbanks presumably owned the MS and supplied Wecter with the TS (see the textual commentary for 24 and 25 Dec 68 to Fairbanks, pp. 583–84, and MTMF, 55 n. 1, for discussions of another Wecter transcript made from a Thomas Nast Fairbanks TS). □

Emendations and textual notes:

Sept. 24 • Sept. 24 [1868]

My Dear Mother— • [Wecter inexplicably deleted these words, then marked them ‘STET’.]

something • something | (over) [Wecter’s indication that his transcript continued on the recto.]

night. • night. ‸ [ no complimentary close given ] ‸ | [no signature or close is given in this typescript] [Wecter’s description; he used the revised wording in MTMF.]