1 Some of Clemens’s April–May correspondence with Orion and Mollie Clemens has been lost. Extant family letters (all in CU-MARK) indicate, however, that Mollie came to Hartford on Friday, 10 April, remaining at least through the following day, to ask Clemens to help her and Orion purchase a farm in Keokuk, Iowa, her home town. By 23 April he was considering doing so, but had offered them the alternative of an outright pension, to consist of “the interest on eight thousand dollars” (OC to SLC, 27 Apr 74, quoted below). Mollie explored the farm purchase in a letter to P. T. Lomax, a Keokuk lawyer since at least 1857 (OC 1857, 46):

On a page of “Payments, principal & interest” that she prepared around this time and submitted to Clemens (he labeled it “The Stotts purchase”), Mollie calculated that she and Orion could complete the purchase by 1 November 1878, paying a total, with interest, of $2,805 to William Stotts and Ann E. Stotts Riffley, her father and sister (10 May 74 to Howells, n. 3). She described the farm in a letter to Jane Clemens (25? Apr 74), who opposed the purchase:

(Mollie’s mother, Mary Patterson [Polly] Stotts, had died in 1869.) On 25 April, the day she received this letter to Orion, Mollie replied. Her embedded quotation of Clemens’s words is the sole source for the text of the letter to Orion:

Orion wrote his own reply to Clemens’s letter of 23 April, in which he too declined the offer of a pension, but he also confirmed that his current “dreaming” only reluctantly included the Keokuk farm (CU-MARK):

Two days later, however, Orion took a more positive view:

Orion had turned down the “place near Hartford” in favor of Rutland, Vermont, where he lived for a short time in mid-1873 while editing the Rutland Globe (see L5, 241 n. 1, 363 n. 1). No further correspondence concerning the farm purchase survives until Clemens’s letters of 10 May 74 to JLC and 10 May 74 to OC.