11 December 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01164)
Mrs. Clemens is distressed to think you could believe she could receive that book & not have the grace to sit down & write you thanking you for it. {She Ⓐemendationreally believes that you think I wrote her note.} I tell her, never mind, she shall have the credit of writing some of my letters, but that don’t seem to cover the difficulty.1explanatory note
Here I have been waiting to add two or three lines to article No. 1 when the proof should come, wholly forgetting that the proof has come & gone again, long ago! However, it is no matter; but I do wish I had thought about it sooner.2explanatory note
Mrs. Clemens was not much wholly pleased with No. 1;—which I had not time to re-write. Now she disapproves of a considerable portion of No. 4, so I shall lick it into shape before I tackle No. 5.
I have the madam’s permission to treat myself to a holiday next Tuesday, the 15th, & so I fo mean to be at that Atlantic dinner. Mrs. Clemens would go with me to Boston, but her mother is to arrive here that night.3explanatory note
With kindest remembrances to Mrs. Howells
Clemens returned the proofs of the first installment of “Old Times” with his 25 November letter to Howells, then wrote on 9 December proposing the addition he here abandoned. When he expanded the Atlantic series into Life on the Mississippi, in 1882, he reused the first installment as chapters 4 and 5, without adding any new material.
Mrs. Langdon and the Cranes spent Christmas in Hartford, but it is not known whether they arrived in mid-December or after their stay in New York on 22 and 23 December (see p. 328).
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).
L6 , 313–314; MTHL , 1:45–46.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.