Hartford, May 19, ’86. 
My dear Howells,--.....  Here’s a secret.   A most curious and pathetic
romance, which has just come to light.   Read these things, but don’t
mention them.   Last fall, my old mother—­then 82—­took a notion to attend
a convention of old settlers of the Mississippi Valley in an Iowa town. 
My brother’s wife was astonished; and represented to her the hardships
and fatigues of such a trip, and said my mother might possibly not even
survive them; and said there could be no possible interest for her in
such a meeting and such a crowd.   But my mother insisted, and persisted;
and finally gained her point.   They started; and all the way my mother
was young again with excitement, interest, eagerness, anticipation.   They
reached the town and the hotel.   My mother strode with the same eagerness
in her eye and her step, to the counter, and said: 

“Is Dr. Barrett of St. Louis, here?”

“No.  He was here, but he returned to St. Louis this morning.”

“Will he come again?”

“No.”

My mother turned away, the fire all gone from her, and said, “Let us go home.”

They went straight back to Keokuk.  My mother sat silent and thinking for many days—­a thing which had never happened before.  Then one day she said: 

“I will tell you a secret.  When I was eighteen, a young medical student named Barrett lived in Columbia (Ky.) eighteen miles away; and he used to ride over to see me.  This continued for some time.  I loved him with my whole heart, and I knew that he felt the same toward me, though no words had been spoken.  He was too bashful to speak—­he could not do it.  Everybody supposed we were engaged—­took it for granted we were—­but we were not.  By and by there was to be a party in a neighboring town, and he wrote my uncle telling him his feelings, and asking him to drive me over in his buggy and let him (Barrett) drive me back, so that he might have that opportunity to propose.  My uncle should have done as he was asked, without explaining anything to me; but instead, he read me the letter; and then, of course, I could not go—­and did not.  He (Barrett) left the country presently, and I, to stop the clacking tongues, and to show him that I did not care, married, in a pet.  In all these sixty-four years I have not seen him since.  I saw in a paper that he was going to attend that Old Settlers’ Convention.  Only three hours before we reached that hotel, he had been standing there!”

Since then, her memory is wholly faded out and gone; and now she writes letters to the school-mates who had been dead forty years, and wonders why they neglect her and do not answer.

Think of her carrying that pathetic burden in her old heart sixty-four
years, and no human being ever suspecting it! 
                              Yrs ever,
          
                              mark.