to Theodore W. Crane
22 April 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 00458)
1870.
I enclose you an official letter acknowledging rec’pt of check.1explanatory note
All right—I will come down & break one of the horses alon while you break the other. But are you sure your plan is good? It looks feasible, but at the same time I cannot feel certain that it is the safest way. My custom heretofore, when I wanted to break a horse, was to do it with a rail. You cannot get hurt then—unless of course the horse bites you.
Start Mrs. Brown along just as soon as you please—we are ready to welcome her & make her entirely comfortable. (But don’t you suppose “Bell” will prefer to have his visit out with you, first, before he comes?—g Glad to have him, but don’t wish to infe interfere Ⓐemendation with you.}2explanatory note
{ Bett Between Ⓐemendationyou & I,—for Livy would not like it to be known—she remarked awhile ago that she would “comb” those dressmakers if they sent any more messages to me. I don’t know what “combing” is, but that was the remark she made. It is entirely false, I hate to say so}—. }
I hear that Mr. Bailey has been elected superintendent Ⓐemendation of the Industrial School. Can that be true?3explanatory note
We send our love to our Susie.
All well—& all happy.
The enclosure has not been found. The check probably was for all or part of the $4,309.42 that Clemens had allowed Jervis Langdon to hold for him on 10 March. He may now have wanted the funds because of his recent loan to Larned, or for a payment on his debt to Kennett, or for the expenses he alludes to in the next letter. With Langdon still traveling and John D. F. Slee in Buffalo, Crane—like Slee, Langdon’s business associate and soon-to-be partner—was responsible for sending the check to Clemens (11 Mar 70 to Blissclick to open link; 16 and 17 Apr 70 to the Langdonsclick to open link).
Neither Mrs. Brown nor “Bell” has been identified. They probably were not Anna Marsh Brown, and her husband, Talmage. Anna Brown may already have visited the Clemenses (27 Mar 70 to the Langdonsclick to open link).
Isaac H. Bailey (1821–95), a tin cutter manufacturer, was a fellow parishioner of the Langdons’ and Cranes’ at Congregational Church. Clemens may have been surprised at Bailey’s reported election because, since its founding in June 1869, the Elmira Industrial School, which the Langdons and Cranes helped support, had been managed by a group of women volunteers. Among them was Anna M. Crane, Theodore Crane’s half sister, who was one of the teachers, and Mrs. J. D. Steele, the superintendent (possibly outgoing). At the school’s two-hour sessions, currently held on Saturday afternoons at the First Methodist Church, about fifty girls “from homes of poverty and vice” were encouraged in habits of “punctuality, improvement and cleanliness” while being taught to sew. The goal was for pupils to learn “how to earn bread, . . . quite as important to the poor as a knowledge of Geography and Grammar” (“Industrial School,” Elmira Advertiser, 1 Mar 70, 4; “Death of Isaac Bailey,” Elmira Gazette and Free Press, 31 May 95, 8; Boyd and Boyd, 62; “Annual Report of the Industrial School,” Elmira Saturday Evening Review, 9 July 70, 8; Gretchen Sharlow and Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., personal communications).
MS, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).
L4 , 116–117.
donated to CtHMTH in 1963 by Ida Langdon.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.