April 2 Tuesday – Joe Twichell replied to the notice of Susy’s birth.

Dear Mark, / We were so taken aback by the sudden news of the nativity at Elmira that really we could not find breath for a speedy remark on the subject. And since we put off speech in the first moment, later silence has not signified. You deprived us of a luxury we had much reckoned on by your confounded precipitation. We had supposed that we should have ample scope to wait and wonder, and surmise and hope and expect, but lo, you cut us off from even a single hour of sweet uneasiness for you, by your desperate earliness. The little maid ought to be called “Festina”—the hasty or hastening one. Well, God grant she may keep well ahead of all the worlds worst troubles as long as she lives.

We greet and salute and bless her. And to her dear mother we send our best love. Now that we have had Livy among us, we find her absence irksome, and want her back. Indeed, about the first thing we thought of when your bulletin announced the birth was that now you would return sooner than you had been proposing. Is it so?

By the way, Mark, you are not going to be in New York in the next few days, are you? For, you see, I am going down Saturday to stay till the following Wednesday—and going alone. So that we could get at least one regular old classic and attic night together in case we were there together. Again, our love to Livy.

Yours as ever

J. H. Twichell

Regards to T.K.B. [Beecher]

P.S. A telegram just received upsets my plan of going to New York as within described. I shall not be there till Tuesday [MTPO].