I mean to get a photo of it—­and use it if it confirms yesterday’s conviction.  That’s a very nice word from the Catholic Magazine and I am glad you sent it.  I mean to show it to my priest—­we are very fond of him.  He is a stealing man, and is also learnedly scientific.  He invented the thing which records the seismatic disturbances, for the peoples of the earth.  And he’s an astronomer and has an observatory of his own.

Ah, many’s the cry I have, over reflecting that maybe we could have had Young Harmony for Livy, and didn’t have wit enough to think of it.

Speaking of Livy reminds me that your inquiry arrives at a good time (unberufen) It has been weeks (I don’t know how many!) since we could have said a hopeful word, but this morning Katy came the minute the day-nurse came on watch and said words of a strange and long-forgotten sound:  “Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Clemens is really and truly better!—­anybody can see it; she sees it herself; and last night at 9 o’clock she said it.”

There—­it is heart-warming, it is splendid, it is sublime; let us enjoy it, let us make the most of it today—­and bet not a farthing on tomorrow.  The tomorrows have nothing for us.  Too many times they have breathed the word of promise to our ear and broken it to our hope.  We take no tomorrow’s word any more.

You’ve done a wonder, Joe:  you’ve written a letter that can be sent in to Livy—­that doesn’t often happen, when either a friend or a stranger writes.  You did whirl in a P. S. that wouldn’t do, but you wrote it on a margin of a page in such a way that I was able to clip off the margin clear across both pages, and now Livy won’t perceive that the sheet isn’t the same size it used to was.  It was about Aldrich’s son, and I came near forgetting to remove it.  It should have been written on a loose strip and enclosed.  That son died on the 5th of March and Aldrich wrote me on the night before that his minutes were numbered.  On the 18th Livy asked after that patient, and I was prepared, and able to give her a grateful surprise by telling her “the Aldriches are no longer uneasy about him.”

I do wish I could have been present and heard Charley Clark.  When he
can’t light up a dark place nobody can. 
                    With lots of love to you all. 
          
                                        Mark.

Mrs. Clemens had her bad days and her good days-days when there seemed no ray of light, and others that seemed almost to promise recovery.  The foregoing letter to Twichell, and the one which follows, to Richard Watson Gilder, reflect the hope and fear that daily and hourly alternated at Villa Quarto

To Richard Watson Gilder, in New York: