It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise out of those daily letters.  A surprise like that is always watching a chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to reveal it.

However, the traveler remained completely in the dark.  He may have wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale.  If only the Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now!  But these were all incalculable things.  All that he could be sure of was the coming of his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks between.

At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira with the smallest possible delay.  Once there, the intervening days did not matter.  He could join in the busy preparations; he could write exuberantly to his friends.  To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently belongs here: 

Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.

Dear Jim,—­I remember that old night just as well!  And somewhere among my relics I have your remembrance stored away.  It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days.  Still it shouldn’t, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.  You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel’s Camp—­I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed.  I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—­I was just that blind.  But then we were so hard up.  I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since.  Four or five months ago I bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear of it).  I went heavily in debt—­never could have dared to do that, Jim, if we hadn’t heard the jumping Frog story that day.

And wouldn’t I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn’t I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of Rinalds in the “Burning Shame!” Where is Dick and what is he doing?  Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.

A week from to-day I shall be married-to