19 January 1869 • Cleveland, Ohio (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00235)
I reached here at daylight yesterday morning, Livy dear, pretty well tired out with railroading1explanatory note—& they called me at 8 o’clock, this morning. It was a great mistake. They ought to have let me sleep longer. I did not try to get to Sparta, because I found it could not be done. I found a Plymouth Pulpit here da postmarked Dec. 30—a sermon on self-culture & self-denial—& read it through in bed last night. “Man is a tease.” You marked that for me, you little rascal—what do you mean by such conduct as those? But I liked the sermon, notwithstanding it was below Mr. Beecher’s average. You found little in it to mark, but what there was, was Truth, & came home to me.2explanatory note
I find the family well & happy. But I meet with one disappointment—Mr. Benedict is sick & very low, & so I cannot talk business w with him.3explanatory note All yesterday afternoon I played cribbage with Miss Allie4explanatory note—everybody else was gone up town. I worried her considerably, in a good natured way. Occasionally I would say, absently, “Well I wish I were in Elmira”—& she would retort very sharply,—“Indeed? well why don’t you start?—I’m not keeping you.” And sometimes I would observe, politely, “I wish you were Livy—then I would take more interest in this game—I love to play cribbage with Livy.” We had a very pleasant time of it. She beat four games out of eleven. Charlie Stillwell is in Indiana—she says she writes to him every night, the last thing before she goes to bed; & he writes her every day. It is true—& if you had less to fatigue you, & more leisure, Livy darling, I would beg you to write me every day. Still, th Ⓐemendation if you did, I am afraid you wouldn’t write as long a letter as you do now, & so I am not sure I would be better off. I ought to be grateful enough—& am—that you write me every two days.
Although they called me so early this morning, they didn’t and ruined my sleep, for good, they didn’t get me up till 10 o’clock & after—& so Mr. & Mrs. F. were gone up town. Miss Allie set the table for me & kept me company—& I did wish it were your dear little self instead, but I didn’t say it until I had got my second cup of coffee. She says the servant girls are never good-natured about late breakfasts, except for me—& that they say they are glad to hear I am coming, & glad to do anything for me at any time. Isn’t that splendid? Because you know when good-will is shown me by servants, it is a patient, much-suffering sincere good-will, for I am a necessarily a nuisance to them with my rascally irregular ways. But you will break up all my irregularities when we are married, & civilize me, & make of me a model husband & an ornament to society—won’t you, you dear matchless little woman? And you’ll be the dearest, best little wife in all the world, & we shall be happier than ever any condition of single life can experience. Let May the day come soon!—Amen.
I haven’t been shaved for three days—& when Mrs. Fairbanks kissed me this morning, she said I looked like the moss-covered bucket.5explanatory note Livy dear, be sure & tell Charlie that his letter came this morning, & it shall all be just as he says. Ⓐemendation —& I would write him a line & shake him by the hand if I had a moment of time to spare. But I haven’t even the time to write you only these 3 or 4 pages (there goes the dinner-bell) & I’ll hear from Mrs. F. in a minute. Must go up town right after dinner. We are going to write you all a family dinner.6explanatory note
Good-bye—& take this loving kiss—& this—& this—my darling Livy—& God bless you.
They are hurrying me—Fairbanks called up stairs to know what part of the chicken I wanted—told him to give me the port side, for’rard of the wheel.
f
Miss Olivia L. Langdon Present
docketed by OLL in pencil: 29th and in ink: mint
Clemens was at the home of Abel and Mary Mason Fairbanks, on whose personal stationery he wrote this letter. He remained with the Fairbankses until 25 January, except for the nights of 20 and 21 January, which he spent in Toledo and Norwalk, respectively, after delivering his lecture.
“Self-Control Possible to All,” the sermon Henry Ward Beecher delivered in Plymouth Church on 11 October 1868, was first published in the Plymouth Pulpit, probably on 24 October (see 14 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 4click to open link). Beecher advocated a life of self-discipline as a means to “become better, sweeter, more divine and noble.” He noted that man was “the only universal tease. The hardest thing to bear is men. They annoy you; they try you; they torment you; they vex you. . . . A man that can bear cheerfully his fellow-men has little to learn.” But such a spirit of tolerance was only commendable, he warned, if practiced “for a moral end” and not for worldly gain (Henry Ward Beecher 1869, 51–52, 59).
Clemens had hoped to talk to George A. Benedict, one of Abel Fairbanks’s two partners in the Cleveland Herald, about the possibility of buying into the paper.
Alice Holmes Fairbanks.
The allusion is to “The Bucket” (1818), by Samuel Woodworth: “The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, / The moss-covered bucket which hung in the well.” See also L2 , 35–37.
Neither the letter from Charles J. Langdon nor the family “dinner” (i.e., letter) to Olivia are known to survive.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L3 , 49–51; LLMT , 55–56; MTMF , 67, brief quotations.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.