But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying.  Half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee.  The letter to Orion Clemens’s wife has been preserved.

    Memphis, Tenn., Friday, June 18, 1858.

Dear sister Mollie,—­Long before this reaches you my poor Henry—­my darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness.  The horrors of three days have swept over me—­they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time.  Mollie, there are gray hairs in my head to-night.  For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair.  Men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up!  May God forgive them, for they know not what they say.

I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and I must tell you the truth, Mollie—­three hundred human beings perished by that fearful disaster.  But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth.  She has done her duty by these poor afflicted creatures—­especially Henry, for he has had five—­aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had.  Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours.  There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, “May the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!” The ladies have done well, too.  Our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die.  Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed him a pretty bouquet.  The poor suffering boy’s eyes kindled, his lips quivered out a gentle “God bless you, Miss,” and he burst into tears.  He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not forget it.

    Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother. 
    Your unfortunate brother,

    SAML.  L. Clemens.

    P. S.—­I got here two days after Henry.

But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst.  It would seem that Samuel Clemens’s cup of remorse must be always overfull.  The final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident —­the night that Henry died.  He could never bring himself to write it.  He was never known to speak of it but twice.

Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next:  Dr. Peyton came around about eleven o’clock on the sixth night and made careful examination.  He said: