April 27 Monday – Sam wrote from Quarry Farm, Elmira to Dr. John Brown that the family was well, and they were in Elmira to spend the summer, though a snowstorm hit day before. Elmira grew hot in the summer, Sam wrote, so they moved to “the top of a hill 6 or 700 feet high, about 2 or 3 miles from here—it never gets hot up there” [MTL 6: 121].

Orion Clemens wrote again to Sam.

My Dear Brother:— /I talked to you as I did I suppose from sheer habit of gloomy foreboding. I was afraid we would get out there without a dollar to work with, and I would have to go to St. Louis and go into a printing office, and leave Mollie to run the farm by herself, and perhaps I could not even get work, while here I was already getting ten dollars per week. So I was ready to decline going for the same reason I left Hannibal—because I was afraid I could not stay. But Mollie has inspired me with her faith and hope. It begins to creep into my mind that your desire to rid me of some of my discontents weighs more with you than the consideration of the money needed. The offer to devote perpetually the interest on eight thousand dollars, where it would be likely never to return, if we were abject enough to accept, satisfies me that you will not feel it a heavy cross to part with the needed funds for the Keokuk place, even if it was never to go back to you. But Mollie feels sanguine that we can pay you principal and interest all you advance in five years. I shall go intending to work faithfully, and believing I shall be more cheerful with out-door employment. We do not think that we shall need from you the first year more than the fifteen hundred dollars you told me you thought you could spare. The property will be in your name, and with our improvements will doubtless be worth all that and the remaining sums of principal and interest as set down in the account we sent you. It is true this sums up, (as spread over five years), near four thousand dollars, but I am the more emboldened to think this will not frighten you, from the fact that you were willing to buy for us a place near Hartford to cost without other expenses, four thousand dollars. I have but one preference for that—it would be a home near you. I gave weight to that when I left to go to Rutland; but not enough. Yet who can see where a path through the future would have led, only from seeing the beginning? Before I left, the cloudy obscurity was beginning to draw over my mind that drove me from Rutland, that has neutralized my forces so often, that seems so independent of circumstances, and that yet, I hope, will not come again to haunt me in the open air. So, if it please you, we will go to Keokuk. Love to all. / Affectionately,/ Your brother, / Orion [MTPO].