Olivia’s physician, Rachel Brooks Gleason, was now associated with her sister, Dr. Lucy Zipporah Brooks Wales, and her brother-in-law, Dr. Theron A. Wales, as well as her physician husband, Silas, in the Elmira Water Cure. The Gleasons’ daughter, Adele (Della), received her medical degree from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in 1875 ( L4 , 335 n. 2; Elmira Advertiser: “City and Neighborhood,” 29 Jan 74, 4; “Dr. Zippie Brooks Wales Passes Away,” 5 July 1912, 5; information courtesy of Herbert A. Wisbey; “Personal References,” 94).

Named Clara, after Olivia’s friend Clara Spaulding (11 July 74 to JLCclick to open link). The Elmira Advertiser waited until 8 July to report the birth: “Mark Twain is now entitled to Mark Thrice. This time it is a girl and pulls down seven and a half pounds” (“City and Neighborhood,” 4).

Neither the letter from Mollie Clemens received on 10 June nor her and Orion’s earlier letters from Keokuk have been found. Both sent lengthy replies to Clemens’s present letter, Orion’s dated 14 June, Mollie’s undated but probably written on the same day. The letters mingled congratulations on the new baby with reports of snakes, hens, a toad, and other particulars of farm life. And Mollie alluded to a snag in her plan to buy, and not merely rent, her father’s farm: “Pa asks $2,500 for his place, for the prospective water power for manufacturing; but we see no probability of such an enterprise and aside from that his land is worth $200 an acre, for the 4 acres $800, or with the houses $1200” (CU-MARK). That is, William Stotts had increased his original price of $2,000, while still expecting Orion and Mollie to assume the existing $450 mortgage (23 Apr 74 to OC, n. 1click to open link). They, however, had now decided that the property was worth $800 less. Resigning herself for the moment to merely renting, Mollie hoped for better in the future. “If we succeed here,” she wrote Clemens, “and can buy a place, we can have a lovely home with comparatively little expense.” But almost a year later she and Orion were still renting, and still trying to buy, the Stotts farm (27 Mar 75 to OCclick to open link).

Downey, fired by mail in May, had worked for Orion and Mollie in the spring of 1872, while they cared for the Clemenses’ house in Hartford. In her letter of 14 June, Mollie told Clemens: “You acted nobly generously by Downy” (CU-MARK). Mary McAleer evidently kept her husband, Patrick, “straight” by keeping him from drinking (8 May 74 to Perkinsclick to open link; L5 , 87 n. 1, 89 n. 8, 127; “Coachman Many Years for Mark Twain,” Hartford Courant, 26 Feb 1906, 6).

From mid-June 1855 until mid-October 1856 Clemens lived mostly in Keokuk, while working in Orion’s print shop, the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In July 1860 he spent three weeks there between Mississippi River piloting assignments, and visited again in April 1867 to deliver his Sandwich Islands lecture ( L1 , 58–59, 69, 101 n. 1; L2 , 20 n. 2).