March 3 Thursday – Sam and Livy (in shaded text) finished their letter to Jervis Langdon.

Your two letters came this morning, father, & your dispatch yesterday afternoon. (Mem.—Ellen’s in the stable & the horse in the attic looking at the scenery.)

We think it cannot be worth while to enter into an explanation of the Express figures, for the reason that Mr. Slee must have arrived in Elmira after your letter was written, & he would explain them to you much more clearly & understandingly than I could.

I thank you ever so much for your offer to take my money & pay me interest on it until we decide whether to add it to the Kennett purchase or not. I was going to avail myself of it at once, but waited to see if Mr. Slee & MacWilliams [sic McWilliams]couldn’t make Selkirk’s figures show a little more favorably. As I hoped, so it has resulted. And now, upon thorough conviction that the Express is not a swindle, I will pay some more on the Kennett indebtedness.

I am very glad to begin to see my way through this business, for figures confuse & craze me in a little while. I haven’t Livy’s tranquil nerve in the presence of a financial complexity—when her cash account don’t balance (which does not happen oftener than once a day) false she just increases the item of “Butter 78 cents” to “Butter 97 cents”—or reduces the item of “Gas, $6.45” to “Gas, $2.35” & makes that account balance. She keeps books with the most inexorable accuracy that ever mortal man beheld.

Father it is not true— Samuel slanders me—

I wrote “Polishing Irons” at the head of this letter the other night to remind either Livy or me to write about them—didn’t put it there for a text to preach from.

The report of my intending to leave Buffalo Livy & I have concluded emanates from Hartford, for the reason that it really started in the newspapers only a very little while after my last visit & your last letter to Hartford, & has been afloat ever since.

Yr son

Samuel

[MTL 4: 82]. Note: shaded text by Livy.

Sam also wrote Elisha Bliss, asking him to send a free copy of his book to an old Hannibal boyhood friend now a Methodist preacher in Rolla, Mo.—Lewis Frank Walden (d.1924) [MTL 4: 84]. Note: Walden was a close boyhood pal of Sam’s and lived on Palmyra Avenue (now Mark Twain Avenue) at the foot of Cardiff Hill. Besides all the boyhood games and pranks shared, Walden set type in the Hannibal Courier office with Sam, and later purchased the place [Hannibal Courier-Post, Mar. 6, 1935 p.9C].