I should have sooner acknowledged the receipt of your generous and characteristic letter refusing to accept your expenses &c. incurred upon our invitation to be present at our Army of The Tenn. Banquet and Reunion. but I wanted to get our Executive Committee together & read your letter to them before I answered it. One and all voted you to be a regular “Oner”—a sort of prince in disguise—a nobleman who “derives his title to nobility directly from Almighty God— Before we had the pleasure of meeting and knowing you we all admired your tallent (not “slow on trigger”) and felt ourselves deeply indebted to you for some of the pleasantest and jolliest hours of our several existences, for not when listening to Jo Jeffersen or Lotta or any of the great actors or actresses who make us happy have I, at least, had as exquisite real substantial pleasure—joy that makes the heart light and wreaths the face with smiles—as when in my little family circle, reading to my darlings from “Innocents Abroad,” “Roughing It,” and other productions of the sage—this philosopher-theologian-statesman & historian and incomparable wit—Mark Twain—may his shadow increase! I say we all came about as near to actually loving the man who had done so much towards making the world cheerful & happy as was proper—you being a married man— But your coming to our Reunion & helping us out at our Banquet and staying around & letting us come to know you personally and finally writing that last letter was all that was needed to precipitate a crisis in the state of our feelings—and I advise Mrs C in time that she has good ground to be jealous of us boys of the society—of The Army of The Tennessee—for we acknowledge to being “clean gone” on her husband. We thank her too for letting you come—for we are most of us married men & speak advisedly when we say “let you come”— And then that noble & generous sentiment of hers—“When we can do the least thing for our (we like that word “our”) soldiers it is above duty; it’s a privilege.” I have seen tears come to the eyes of some as brave men as ever faced death on a battlefield when they read that— God bless her—God bless you—God bless your babies—God bless us all!