13 November 1874 • New Boston, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01150)
Livy darling, it is bitter cold weather. We got up at half past 5 this morning, took breakfast & cleared out just as the dawn was breaking. It was a magnificent morning; the woods were white with frost, & our hands wouldn’t keep warm—nor ourselves either. I supposed there was a flag-stone pavement all the way to Boston, but I find there is nothing but wagon roads.
We shall take the train & be in Boston at 7 this evening.1explanatory note Wish we had accepted Howells’s invitation.2explanatory note
Good bye my darling
addressed by OLC, in ink: Mrs S. L. Clemens | Farmington Avenue | Hartford | ct. postmarked: quinebaug . conn. Nov 13
In his journal, Twichell explained that in Ashford early on the morning of Friday, 13 November,
it became evident that our pedestrianism was about over, from the fact that Mark was exceedingly lame, but most conclusively from the fact that he had not slept at all, owing to the tea he drank at supper. However we got away from the tavern at 6½—a bitter cold morning—and made the 6 miles to North Ashford rather slowly, and there surrendered. There was no use in keeping it up. (Twichell, 1:16)
In North Ashford, about thirty-five miles from Hartford, they stopped at another tavern. Twichell chatted with the proprietor, C. M. Brooks, a fellow Yale graduate and formerly “a New York lawyer stranded by strange circumstances on those forlorn hills”:
Mark went to bed to try for a nap. I told our host who he was, and who we were, and then he wanted to have us go in and see his lately paralyzed wife which we did for about 5 m, but then retreated, the lady being quite unable to converse and looking “gashly”. But we were very sorry for both of them. . . .
At 12 o’clock we started from N. Ashford for New Boston to take the cars, Mr. Brooks driving us in a narrow seated buggy behind the slowest horse I ever saw. It was a very cold tedious ride of 10 m. and we suffered the acutest hardship of the whole trip in taking it. Mr. Brooks wouldn’t accept a cent of pay for his part of the service done us, and would take but $3.00 for the man who owned the horse. (Twichell, 1:16–18)
The invitation was to a party on the evening of Friday, 13 November; Clemens had not expected to arrive in Boston until Saturday evening.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L6 , 279–280; LLMT , 192–93.
see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.