11 November 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Buffalo Courier, 26 Dec 70, UCCL 11745)
He, fancyfying that people down here dress the same as they do up there, has come without his bandbox; &Ⓐemendation I wish you would buy him a cloak & cap, & order the groceryman that you buy them of to send them express to me.1explanatory note
The Buffalo Courier reported that Mark Twain made these remarks about his baby “in a letter to a friend.” The recipient may have been Fidele A. Brooks, a New York acquaintance he had made through the Langdons. On 12 November she wrote to him, celebrating Langdon Clemens’s recovery and remarking: “We all cry hurrah for cap and cloak. It sounds like coming down to see Aunt Fidele. Tell Livy I will buy out Stewarts for her. Anything, everything that she may desire she shall have. The dear little mother” (preserved in Olivia Clemens’s commonplace book, CU-MARK). The Courier’s source, probably one of its newspaper exchanges, has not been identified. And since Clemens sometimes repeated himself in announcing an event, it is possible that his letter was to someone other than Mrs. Brooks. Alexander T. Stewart’s dry-goods emporium, built in 1862, occupied an entire block between Ninth and Tenth streets and Broadway and Fourth Avenue.
“Personal,” Buffalo Courier, 26 Dec 70, 1.
L4 , 231.