“everything,” adding, “so you see how good I am to follow the counsel of my children.”  He closed:  “Samuel, I love your wife and she loves me.  I think it is only fair that you should know it, but you need not flare up.  I loved her before you did, and she loved me before she did you, and has not ceased since.  I see no way but for you to make the most of it.”  He was already a very ill man, and this cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.

He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack early in May; in June his condition became critical.  Clemens and his wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.  Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse.  His delicacy and thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always amused and interested the patient.  In later years Mark Twain once said: 

“How much of the nursing did I do?  My main watch was from midnight to four in the morning, nearly four hours.  My other watch was a midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours.  The two sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four hours between them, and each of them tried generously and persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch.  I went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure.  I went on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched, straight along through the four hours.  I can still see myself sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white face of the patient.  I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand, and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock.  During all that dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came.  When the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship appear against the sky.  I was well and strong, but I was a man, afflicted with a man’s infirmity—­lack of endurance.”

He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were about him then have left a different story.

It was all without avail.  Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there was hope for his recovery.  He failed again, and on the afternoon of the 6th of August he died.  To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one.  It was the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire remaining period of their Buffalo residence.

There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks.  Both of these projects were now abandoned.  Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.