To Mary Mason Fairbanks
17 February 1869 • Titusville, Pa.
(MS: CSmH, UCCL 00257)

Dear Mother—

It is all right. By staying up thirty-six hours with only one hour’s sleep, I have made the several connections. I talked in Alliance Monday night, docking my wages $20 by way of damages. I talked here last night (saw Mr. & Mrs. Severance & they are well,)1 & am within two hours’ journey of Franklin, where I talk to-night. I shall have to pay the Franklin Ma Society $25 or $30 for [putting ] off the lecture after it was already advertized, & then I shall be all right.2 And so nobody can say a [word ] against Mr. Fairbanks & me, now—for we have fulfilled our contracts & done our duty. Shake hands with him for me.

I haven’t ‸got‸ nothing more to write, I believe, because there ain’t no topicts of interest here to write about, except that Beech was here & the angel of the coal mine went down in an oil well.3 No damage to [either. Oils ] well that ends well.

By a letter from Charley I am overwhelmed with gratitude to learn that up to two hours after I left Elmira, Livy was still well. I send you your youngest pup’s letter, to let you see for yourself.4

Your affectionate old pup,

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Why the Severances were in Titusville, some one hundred miles from Cleveland, has not been explained.

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2 The Franklin lecture was originally scheduled for Monday, 15 February (“Lecture by Mark Twain,” Franklin Venango Spectator, 12 Feb 69, 3, TS in CU-MARK).

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3 Beech, the “angel,” and the oil well are unidentified. In 1859, the drilling of “the first spouting petroleum well in history” near Titusville had transformed that “drowsy village” into “a boom town of shady characters, hard life, easy philosophy, and rough democracy.” By the time of Clemens’s lecture, the town boasted itself “the great commercial centre” of the Pennsylvania oil region (Pennsylvania, 76, 582; “Mark Twain at Corinthian Hall Tonight,” Titusville Morning Herald, 16 Feb 69, 3).

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4 The enclosure, Charles Langdon’s 12 February letter to Clemens, has not been found.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14242).

Previous publication: L3, 107–108; MTMF, 75; Davis 1979, with omission.

Provenance:see Huntington Library, pp. 582–83.

Emendations and textual notes:

putting • [‘g’ over miswritten ‘n’]

word • woreed

either. Oils • either.— |Oils