July 17 Friday – At Quarry Farm in Elmira, N.Y. Sam wrote to Edward W. Bok.
The pictures of this place, which has been our summer home for more than a generation, are finished, & Mr. Marr has just gone. Here we shall remain until we sail for Italy toward the end of October.
I enclose a word or two to go with one or two of the pictures & explain them [MTP]. Note: Thomas E. Marr, Boston photographer, who was hired by Harper’s, or, as Sam wrote in his Oct. 17 to Pears, a “Philadelphia periodical” (Ladies’ Home Journal; see Nov. 1903 issue); see photographs in Cotton’s Mark Twain’s Elmira (1985).
Sam also wrote to daughter Clara in Riverdale, N.Y.
You dear little rat, the reason I was troubled was because your mother was very miserable for several days & I dreaded the effects of your revelations. Why, dear me, it almost gave me a collapse to read about the surgical butcheries you were undergoing & contemplating. But you’re forgiven. You can tell everything from this out—your mother is bound to have it so.
She says go ahead & pay those holiday-visits, by all means, if you are strong enough & the heat isn’t too great.
I am so thankful you are going to pull out of that slaughter-house & come along home with the remains of your throat. The air is divine here, & will set you right up. There is no medicine to equal it.
Now that the weather is getting warm enough to permit it, your mother will begin to sleep out in the open, to-night as an experiment. That will be effective medicine, too. She sleeps but poorly & brokenly in the house.
She drove out with aunt Sue & Miss Sherry yesterday.
Last night we wheeled her almost to Jean’s trough in the chair.
We shall take the villa Papiniano to-morrow by cable.
We sail for Genoa October 24 in the great & fine ship, the “Princess Irene”—rooms on the promenade deck.
With lots of love to you & Jean / Father [LLMT 343-4].
Note: Miss Margaret Sherry, Livy’s trained nurse, who accompanied them to Europe, and would stay until Dec. 7, 1903. The Clemenses had horse-watering troughs made with inscriptions for each of their children from Langdon to Jean.
Originally these were placed next to the road leading up to the farm house at Quarry farm. Clara’s trough has been moved to the campus of Elmira College. All are now used as planters. See insert photo taken Sept. 2009 of Susy’s trough, which bears dates of birth and death, and is home to healthy hosta plants. Jean’s trough is about 100 yards down the hill near what is now the corner of the property.