MY DEAR MOTHER,--I have told Livy all about Annie's beautiful house, and about Sam and Charley, and about Charley's ingenious manufactures and his strong manhood and good promise, and how glad I am that he and Annie married.And I have told her about Annie's excellent house-keeping, also about the great Bacon conflict; (I told you it was a hundred to one that neither Livy nor the European powers had heard of that desolating struggle.)And I have told her how beautiful you are in your age and how bright your mind is with its old-time brightness, and how she and the children would enjoy you.And I have told her how singularly young Pamela is looking, and what a fine large fellow Sam is, and how ill the lingering syllable "my" to his name fits his port and figure.
Well, Pamela, after thinking it over for a day or so, I came near inquiring about a state-room in our ship for Sam, to please you, but my wiser former resolution came back to me.It is not for his good that he have friends in the ship.His conduct in the Bacon business shows that he will develop rapidly into a manly man as soon as he is cast loose from your apron strings.
You don't teach him to push ahead and do and dare things for himself, but you do just the reverse.You are assisted in your damaging work by the tyrannous ways of a village-- villagers watch each other and so make cowards of each other.After Sam shall have voyaged to Europe by himself, and rubbed against the world and taken and returned its cuffs, do you think he will hesitate to escort a guest into any whisky-mill in Fredonia when he himself has no sinful business to transact there?
No, he will smile at the idea.If he avoids this courtesy now from principle, of course I find no fault with it at all--only if he thinks it is principle he may be mistaken; a close examination may show it is only a bowing to the tyranny of public opinion.
I only say it may--I cannot venture to say it will.Hartford is not a large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort.Three or four weeks ago, at a Moody and Sankey meeting, the preacher read a letter from somebody "exposing" the fact that a prominent clergyman had gone from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank it on the premises (a drug store.)A tempest of indignation swept the town.Our clergymen and everybody else said the "culprit" had not only done an innocent thing, but had done it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody's right or business to find fault with it.Perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact that we never have any temperance "rot" going on in Hartford.
I find here a letter from Orion, submitting some new matter in his story for criticism.When you write him, please tell him to do the best he can and bang away.I can do nothing further in this matter, for I have but 3days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a bushel and a half of letters.I am very nearly tired to death.
I was so jaded and worn, at the Taylor dinner, that I found I could not remember 3 sentences of the speech I had memorized, and therefore got up and said so and excused myself from speaking.I arrived here at 3o'clock this morning.I think the next 3 days will finish me.The idea of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous.
A young lady passenger in our ship has been placed under Livy's charge.
Livy couldn't easily get out of it, and did not want to, on her own account, but fully expected I would make trouble when I heard of it.
But I didn't.A girl can't well travel alone, so I offered no objection.
She leaves us at Hamburg.So I've got 6 people in my care, now--which is just 6 too many for a man of my unexecutive capacity.I expect nothing else but to lose some of them overboard.
We send our loving good-byes to all the household and hope to see you again after a spell.
Affly Yrs.
SAM.
There are no other American letters of this period.The Clemens party, which included Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, sailed as planned, on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878.As before stated, Bayard Taylor was on the ship; also Murat Halstead and family.On the eve of departure, Clemens sent to Howells this farewell word:
"And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art.I was talking to Mrs.Clemens about this the other day, and grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it, or to be unaware of it.Nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much."A characteristic tribute, and from the heart.
The first European letter came from Frankfort, a rest on their way to Heidelberg.
To W.D.Howells, in Boston:
FRANKFORT ON THE MAIN, May 4, 1878.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I only propose to write a single line to say we are still around.Ah, I have such a deep, grateful, unutterable sense of being "out of it all." I think I foretaste some of the advantages of being dead.Some of the joy of it.I don't read any newspapers or care for them.When people tell me England has declared war, I drop the subject, feeling that it is none of my business; when they tell me Mrs.
Tilton has confessed and Mr.B.denied, I say both of them have done that before, therefore let the worn stub of the Plymouth white-wash brush be brought out once more, and let the faithful spit on their hands and get to work again regardless of me--for I am out of it all.
