18 April 1875 • Cambridge, Mass. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01220)
the riverside press, cambridge, mass.
We are having a jolly good time here, I can tell you, & mighty sorry I am that you are not here.1explanatory note You must come next time, sweetheart.2explanatory note I enclose an impromptu by little Winnie Howells. She ie always writes an elaborate poem in honor of her father’s birth-day, & fits it to the occasion —but this time she forgot it until the night before & so had to choose a foreign subject & the first that suggested itself.3explanatory note She painted a harebell in water colors at the top of the page, which I have rudely copied. If this child hasn’t genius I don’t know one that has.
I do hope you ain’t lonely tonight my child.
enclosure:
over
Then as I looked & pondered O’er my thoughts, The harebell raised its wondering eyes to me, And said, “he putteth down the mighty from their throne, And he exalteth those of low degree.”March Ist, 1875.
{Written & composed by Winnie Howells, in honor of her father’s birth-day. She is a child of eleven years—daughter of W. D. Howells.}
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens. | Farmington avenue | Hartford, | Conn return address: the atlantic monthly. the riverside press, cambridge, mass. postmarked: cambridge station mass. apr 19
The “jolly good time” included an attempt to attend the centennial celebrations at Concord and Lexington that commemorated the 19 April 1775 battle of the minutemen against British troops. In 1910, in “My Mark Twain,” Howells recalled that he and Clemens had received special invitations that included transportation from Boston, but they decided to depart from Cambridge instead. When they arrived at the station, they found the train so packed with celebrants that they could not board. After various futile efforts to find transportation to Concord, Clemens began to suffer “acute indigestion, which gave his humor a very dismal cast.” A last chance, Howells wrote, came when Clemens chased after a coach with a group of students on top “but luxuriously empty inside. . . . The unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me.” The two men returned to Howells’s house, where they warmed themselves in front of a roaring fire, and then, absurdly and ineffectually, tried to hoax Mrs. Howells with the claim that their trip had been a success. Howells concluded, “I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been” (Howells 1968, 280–82).
Olivia explained her absence in a letter of 23 April to Elinor Howells:
Don’t dream for one instant that my not getting a letter from you kept me from Boston—I am too anxious to go to let such a thing as that keep me—A wet nurse that is tractable and good when I am in the house but who gets drunk when I go away, together with other irresponsible doings by this same nurse when I am not present, lead me to feel that I had better stay closely with my baby until she is weaned, which will not be until next October— (MH-H)
For Clemens’s account of this wet nurse, see 16 Mar 75 to Howells, n. 2click to open link.
Howells’s thirty-eighth birthday was 1 March.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). The letter quoted in note 2, Olivia Clemens to Elinor Howells, 23 Apr 75click to open link, is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).
L6 , 449–451.
See Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.