To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote: 

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 life-namely, that she would have to flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the girl—­she don’t care anything about luxuries)....  She spends no money but her astral year’s allowance, and 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 forevermore.

To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote: 

Dear sue,—­I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens, who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately.  We cannot have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it, so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an inspiration in writing you. . .

Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to Elmira.  He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the circuit.  He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.  Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always.  It was always a temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was none the less distasteful.  In a letter of that spring he wrote: 

I most cordially hate the lecture field.  And after all, I shudder to think I may never get out of it.  In all conversation with Gough, and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business.  I don’t want to get wedded to it as they are.

He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to getting out his book.  The revised proofs were coming now, and he and gentle Livy Langdon read them together.  He realized presently that with her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception.  What he lacked in delicacy—­and his lack was likely to be large enough in that direction—­she detected, and together they pruned it away.  She became his editor during those happy courtship days—­a position which she held to her death.  The world