fe in good shape on my own hook, because I have paddled
my own canoe so long that I could not be satisfied now to let anybody
help me--and my proposed father-in-law is naturally so liberal that it
would be just like him to want to give us a start in life. But I don't
want it that way. I can start myself. I don't want any help. I can run
this institution without any outside assistance, and I shall have a wife
who will stand by me like a soldier through thick and thin, and
never complain. She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in
Christendom. I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
imperatively demands a two-hundred dollar diamond one, and told her it
was typical of her future lot--namely, that she would have to flourish
on substantials rather than luxuries. (But you see I know the girl--she
don't care anything about luxuries.) She is a splendid girl. She spends
no money but her usual year's allowance, and she spends nearly every
cent of that on other people. She will be a good sensible little wife,
without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her beforehand
and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in that--you couldn't
help it if you were to try.

I warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her
beautiful nature is her willing slave for evermore. I take my affidavit
on that statement. Her father and mother and brother embrace and pet her
constantly, precisely as if she were a sweetheart, instead of a blood
relation. She has unlimited power over her father, and yet she never
uses it except to make him help people who stand in need of help....

But if I get fairly started on the subject of my bride, I never shall
get through--and so I will quit right here. I went to Elmira a little
over a week ago, and staid four days and then had to go to New York on
business.

......................

No further letters have been preserved until June, when he is in
Elmira and with his fiancee reading final proofs on the new book.
They were having an idyllic good time, of course, but it was a
useful time, too, for Olivia Langdon had a keen and refined literary
instinct, and the Innocents Abroad, as well as Mark Twain's other
books, are better to-day for her influence.

It has been stated that Mark Twain loved the lecture platform, but
from his letters we see that even at this early date, when he was at