August 11 Friday – In Krankenheil-Tölz, Germany, Livy wrote to Mary C. Shipman (Mrs. Nathaniel Shipman), and Sam “smuggled” in a paragraph at the end. Livy thanked Mary for a visit from Mary’s children, and had just received a letter from Mary’s older son, Frank Shipman. She thanked her for the letter and regretted they could not have seen more of the children, and remarked how meeting home people abroad did away with “preliminaries.”

So we feel as if we knew your travelers in our little seeing of them in Florence better than we should in much seeing of them in Hartford, and we enjoyed it so very much. Susy often says “well about the pleasantest time in Florence was when the Shipmans and the Hillyers were there.” …

Mr. Clemens and Clara and Jean and I are here, in this very uninviting bathing place for a few weeks, but Susy was so very far from strong that the physician wanted her to have a course of baths at Franzensbad, so she is there with a German lady that we found to take her there for a few weeks in advance of us. We expect to join her there in about ten days. She writes me that she is already much better, that she eats enormously and sleeps well.

We expect to remain about a month on the French coast after Susy has finished her baths at Franzensbad and then go to Paris for the winter. Such are the present plans of the Clemens family.

Sam wrote that his paragraph was “smuggled into Mrs. C’s letter privately”:

Mrs. Clemens (as usual) is disturbed because she has used the same word several times in her letter. She detests tautology — & of course she is right, there — but she persists in the superstition that all repetition is tautology — & that is criminal nonsense. I tell her that in repetitions which are innocent there is virtue often, & never vice. But it goes for nothing — it does not persuade her. And how much she loses by this! The daily uprising & downgoing of the sun is to me a spectacle of perennial wonder & delight — but she — why she can’t endure it, because in her opinion it is only a case of exaggerated & inexcusable tautology [MTP].