14 and 15 August 1880 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: Sachs, UCCL 02814)
A couple of months ago I in Hartford, I came down stairs from work one day & found Dr. Stearns’s card on the library table, & our black George said the Dr. was going to Edinburgh & would carry messages to for us to Dr John Brown if we desired. I flew to the telephone & rang up the Retreat; but it was an unfamiliar voice which answered; & moreover it said, “Dr. Stearns sailed from New York yesterday.” Our black rascal would have been killed for leaving the doctor’s card unmentioned for three days, but we could not spare him; for, mixed up with his three or four million vices he has two or three invaluable & absolutely unreplaceable virtues—so we have kept him all these years, & shall probably go on keeping him till Satan sends for him.
We have a new baby a couple of weeks old, & Mrs. Clemens told me I must not forget to tell you. It is a good deal of a girl; perhaps there is not enough of it to be considered a whole one, but still it is a considerable girl, & weighed all of six pounds the first day. It is surprisingly pretty & perfect; & this can be depended on as true, for I would not lightly speak of such things. She is well worth seeing; so if you & we are all well two years hence, this family will cross the ocean on purpose to show her to you.
Mrs. Clemens’s life was threatened for a day or two, but is going along all right, now, & begs to send you her love. Susie (“Megalopis”) is a wise & slender maid of 8 & upwards, now, is very good & lovely, & a deep an able student of the dreadful German tongue.
My new books has been out some little time, now—how glad I was to see the last sheet of the tiresome MS gon out of my hands! I had a rather shady opinion of the work, at first, but now that it has sold forty-seven thousand copies I begin to respect it. When it reaches a hundred thousand I will throw prejudice aside & sit down & read it myself.
A co month ago a dozen of us tried a new plan for international copyright—that of deftly turning the flank of Congress & achieving the thing through the Department of State, in the form of a treaty with foreign powers. I do hope we shall beat that nest of pilferers this (the House of Representatives) this time,—but there’s no telling.
Do you notice what clean manuscript this “stylographic” pen makes? You fill the handle of it with a single squirt of ink from a glass medicine-dropper, & it won’t have to be filled again for a week. The filling is but the work of a second. It is much better than the old-fashioned fountain-pen, for that always made light marks half the time & heavy ones the other half; & you never could really regulate the flow ink-flow & make it uniform. You had to carry the fountain-pen in a little box; but you just shut up the stylographic as you would a silver pencil, & heave it into your trowsers pocket. Admirable invention!—& costs next to nothing.
Aug. 15.
P. S. Mrs. Clemens resents my making no mention of Clara (aged 6½)—or 5½, I forget which) & her many & unusual gifts mental & physical; but I said I left the child out purposely; because you did not know her. Then I wasⒶemendation commanded to put her in—which I have done.
Mrs. Clemens also said to please say to you that she is going to write you a letter when she is set free from bed.
MS, Sachs.
Sotheby’s catalog, 5 June 1996, no. 6859, lot 128, partial publication; MicroPUL, reel 1.
Offered for sale by the Scriptorium in the early 1980s and again by Sotheby’s in 1996.