To Olivia L. Clemens
enclosing a letter (not sent) to J. H. Barton
4 January 1872 • Dayton, Ohio
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00704)

‸The draft for $125 is enclosed.

Dayton, 4th—

Livy, old sweetheart, sent you another book today—Edwin of Deira.1

Have accepted Warner’s friend’s invitation—though I always decline private houses.

No, on second thoughts I don’t dare to do it. A lecterurer [ der dreads ] a private house—Oh, more than he dreads 200 miles of railway travel. I must tear up my letter of acceptance.2 In spite of yourself you respect their unholy breakfast hours—you can’t help it—& then you feel drowsy & miserable for two days & you give two audiences a very poor lecture. No, I don’t dare go there. I like to be perfectly free—more than that: perfectly lawless. Will you read this to Warner & get him to drop the Doctor a line thanking him for the invitation but ‸“kind of”‸ explaining that the necessities of my trade make acceptance impossible? Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel—where I can ring up a domestic & give him a quarter & then break chairs furniture over him—then I go to bed calmed & soothed, & sleep as peacefully as a child. Would the doctor’s [henchmen ] stand that? Indeed no.

I tell you Annies & Sammy’s fresh & genuine delight make squandering watches a coveted & delicious pleasure. I don’t know when I have enjoyed anything so really & so heartily as Annie’s letter. I wish the watch had been seven times as large, & much more beautiful.3

The’s printed joke is splendid. Oh I would love to see Sue & The & Clara in our dear, dear Nook Barn. Hang it, though, I’ll miss it all, I just know. My deluge darling, I deluge you now with all my love—bail it out on them second-hand when they come.4

I know there are other things I ought to write, but it is so late & I am so sleepy.

Expect to put a check in this for $125—making $550 to you since [ just be- ](& including) Danville, Ill.5 Telegraph receipt, if I put in the check.

With a world of love. Oh, the letters! Never get done writing business letters till long past midnight.

Lovingly

Samℓ.

[postscript is cross-written:]

P.S.—me sick? The idea! I would as soon expect a wooden image to get sick. I don’t know what sickness is.

[enclosure:]

{graphic group: 3 vertical x inline overlay}

You, see, Livy dear, I wanted to, but I didn’t dare.

Samℓ.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 This epic poem about Britain’s first Christian king was written by the Scottish poet Alexander Smith (1830–67). Clemens probably sent the first American edition, which was in his library in 1910 (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861; Gribben, 2:648).

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2 He desisted: see the enclosure.

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3 Clemens had selected the watches as Christmas gifts for his niece and nephew, Annie and Samuel Moffett (L4, 507, 510 n. 2).

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4 Susan and Theodore Crane, as well as Olivia’s close friend Clara Spaulding, had been visiting her in Hartford since late December. Clemens had not yet received Olivia’s letter announcing their arrival (L4, 523 n. 2). Theodore Crane’s “printed joke” has not been identified, although Clemens was more explicit about it in his next letter to Olivia, on 7 January. “Nook Barn” was presumably a nickname for the “imposing brick Gothic house” (Van Why, 7) at the corner of Forest and Hawthorn streets which the Clemenses had rented from John and Isabella Beecher Hooker since October 1871. Olivia commented to Annie Moffett, “You’d know this house was built by a Beecher. It’s so queer” (MTBus, 123). The Hookers had built their house on a more than one-hundred-acre farm property that Hooker and his brother-in-law, Francis Gillette, purchased in 1853. It was known as “Nook Farm” because the Park River “curved about the southern part of it in such a way as to leave some thirty or forty acres within the nook” (Hooker, 170).

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5 Clemens had lectured in Danville, Mattoon, and Paris, Illinois, and in Indianapolis, Logansport, and Richmond, Indiana, before arriving in Dayton. He earned $125 for each lecture, except the one in Richmond, for which he received $100. The inserted postscript at the top of the letter shows that he did enclose the check, now lost (Redpath and Fall, 9–12).

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6 A resident of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, where Clemens would lecture on 16 January. Barton had for twenty years been what he characterized as a “most intimate friend” of Charles Dudley Warner. In 1855 he may have been Warner’s associate in a Philadelphia real estate business, Barton and Warner. In 1873 it was Barton who first noticed that The Gilded Age seemed to use the name of one of his associates, George Escol Sellers, for that irrepressible speculator, Colonel Eschol Sellers (Barton to Sellers, 26 Dec 73, PPAmP, in Hill 1962, 108; Lounsbury, ix).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L5, 5–7; MFMT, 52, excerpt; LLMT, 162–63, excerpt, mistakenly as part of 31 Oct 71 to OLC).

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

der dreads • derreads [underscored after revision]

henchmen • hench-|men

just be- • just be- |