21 July 1883 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS and MS facsimile: CU-MARK and MTL, 1:435, UCCL 02616)
Private
I don’t know that I have anything new to report, except that Livy is still gaining, & all the rest of f us flourishing. I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in th a really astonishing way. I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 5 7 years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.
Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day. So I did it, & took to the open air. Then I struck an idea for the instruction of the children, & went to work & carried it out. It took me all day. I measured off 817 feet of the roadway in our farm grounds, with a yard foot-rule, & then divided it up among the English reigns, from the Conquest down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year. I whittled out a basket of little pegs & drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, & gave it that king’s name—thus:
I measured all the reigns exactly—as many feet to the reign as there were years in it. You can look out over the grounds & see the little pegs from the front door—some of them close together, like Richard II, Richard Cromwell, James II, &c; & some prodigiously wide apart, like Henry III, Edward III, George III, &c. It gives the children a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign. Shall invent a violent game to go with it.
And in bed, last night, I invented a way to play it indoors—in a far more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates & events—on a cribbage board.
Hello, supper’s ready. Love to all. Good bye.
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Manuscript Letters Now in the Mark Twain Papers. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 11 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
MS, CU-MARK, is source text for the letter; MS facsimile in MTL (1:435) is source text for the drawing. The MS letter originally comprised four pages; the drawing, now missing, was the third page. The text of the letter in MTL indicates that no additional text has been lost.
MTL, 1:434–35 (complete); MicroML, reel 5 (incomplete MS).