he Gilded Age. In reality the
letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens's sister,
Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It was
a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it
shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to
do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory
is likely to last as long as American history.

III. A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE

Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller
than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if
less celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively
unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a
million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. St.
Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade
with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted
region. There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines
of any consequence--scarcely any maps. For all that one could see or
guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement
like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which
those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry
the merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to
the world outside.

In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had
been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and
others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should want Jane
Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee
venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was natural,
too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write
the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles
counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set
down the number at fifty-four.

Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just
the kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be
certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer. Yet
there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens
must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers letter
ends:

"Come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!"

The Clemens family began immediately its pr