15 and 16 May 1869 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00304)
Livy dear, only let me say Good-night—that is all. Just as I expected, & just as I said in your mother’s letter, Mr. Bliss forgot to mail that letter to you, & I foun Ⓐemendation discovered the fact an hour after supper & took it & cleared out for the post office—it was raining like sixty. I grabbed a seedy old umbrella in the hall & hurried. But that umbrella appeared to go up too much & sloped the wrong way—it was like a funnel—& Livy, would you believe it, before I had walked three blocks it had conveyed more than eighteen tons of rain-water down the back of my neck. If Why, I was ringing wet. And I had my thin shoes on, & I began to soak up, you know. Barrells & barrels I soaked up—& that water rose in me, & rose in me, higher & higher, till it issued from my mouth, & then from my nose, & per presently Ⓐemendation I began to cry—part from grief & part from overflow—because I thought I was y Ⓐemendation going to be drowned, you know—& I said I was a fool to go out without a life-preserver, which Livy always told me never to do it, & now what would become of her?
Well, you know I live half way from Hooker’s to the post office, & it is six miles by the watch, & I only got there just in the nick of time to mail my letter three hours & a half before the mail closed, & I tell you I was glad, & felt smart1explanatory note—& then I bought 4 new numbers of Appleton’s month Journal2explanatory note & went up town & called on Billy Gross a minute,3explanatory note & went away from there & left my Appletons,—& went down to the photographers & ordered a lot of pictures from the negative of the porcelain I gave you,4explanatory note & came away from there & forgot my umbrella—& then rushed back to Appletons Gross’s & got my Appleton’s—& crossed over & started home & got about 3 miles & a half & recollected the umbrella, & said “All right, never had a seeming misfortune yet that wasn’t a blessing in disguise,” & so, turned & tramped back again, damp but cheerful—twice three & a half is nine miles—& got my umbrella, & started out & a fellow said, “Oh, good, it’s you, is it?—you’ve got my umbrella—funny I should find you here.” And it was funny. We had unconsciously swapped umbrellas at the post office, or up a tree, or somewhere, & here, ever so long afterward, & ever so far away, I find him standing unwittingly by his own umbrella looking at those pictures, with my old funnel in his hand. But the moment I picked his property up he recognized it—splendid umbrella, chronome magic case, chronometer balance—he paid a thousand dollars for it in Paris—& it was unquestionably by my umbrella that he had, because his what was left of his paper collar was washed down around the small of his back & he had come just in an ace of gettin being drowned before he noticed the little peculiarity of my property—& you know he had made a pass at that daguerrean shop & climbed in there just in time to save his life,—& he was wet, Livy, you better believe. He was very glad to see me. And I went away cheerful, & said “I never had a seeming misfortune yet but that wasn’t a blessing in disguise—& it holds good yet, & it was a blessing this time, too—for that other fellow.” And then I came home, you know. And since then I have written a beautiful little romance about a nigger which was stolen out of Africa which was a prince—& sold into American slavery, & discovered, 30 years afterward & purchased of his master by the American public & sent home to Timbuctoo—& it is a true roman story, too, & Rev. Trumbull told me all about it—& his father had seen this poor devil with his own eyes—& T. Ⓐemendation showed me his majesty’s portrait (original) painted by Inman. And if you were here you could read this stirring romance, darling, & mark out all the marginal poetry—& mark out all the jokes you didn’t understand—& all the—well everything—you should mark it all out, if you wanted to, for if Livy didn’t like it nobody else should have a chance to like it5explanatory note—& since then—it is just “midnight—& All’s well!”
A thousand blessings on your honored head & kisses on your precious lips, my own darling. Good-night.
Miss Olivia L. Langdon | Elmira | New York. postmarked: hartford conn. may 17 docketed by OLL: 72nd
Elisha Bliss’s home, at 273 Asylum Street, where Clemens was staying, was about a mile west of the Hartford post office (which remained open until 9 P.M.), at 252 Main Street. John and Isabella Beecher Hooker’s home, at the corner of Forest and Hawthorn streets, was about half a mile further west (Geer 1869, map facing 29, 29, 33, 36, 55, 220; Van Why, 7).
Clemens was reading a translation of Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit, which was running serially in Appletons’ (see 13 May 69 to OLL, n. 6click to open link).
William H. Gross was co-owner, with Flavius A. Brown, of Brown and Gross, booksellers, at 313 Main Street, “up town” from the post office (Geer 1869, 63, 64, 137).
Clemens had given this porcelaintype to Olivia in mid-March (see 12–13 Mar 69 to OLLclick to open link). See 19 and 20 May 69 to OLLclick to open link for a reproduction of the print he had now ordered from Edwin P. Kellogg, at 279 Main Street (Geer 1869, 166).
“Romance in Real Life,” Mark Twain’s account of Abduhl Rahhahman, became part of a letter he published in the San Francisco Alta California on 1 August 1869. “The story I have told is a neat little romance and is true,” he concluded. “I have ornamented it, and furbished it up a little, here and there, but I have not marred or misstated any of the main facts” (SLC 1869). The present whereabouts of the painting by Henry Inman (1801–46), the well-known portrait and genre artist, which Henry Clay Trumbull had shown to Clemens, is not known. An engraving of it by Thomas Illman (d. 1859 or 1860) is reproduced here (“The African Prince ...,” Oxford Ohio Literary Register, 15 Sept 28, 252–53; Bolton, 411; Groce and Wallace, 339).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L3 , 236–240; Wecter 1947, 67–68; LLMT , 90–92.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.