I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day long, examining the old localities and talking with the grey-heads who were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago.  It has been a moving time.  I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house.  They were children with me, and afterwards schoolmates.  Now they have a daughter 19 or 20 years old.  Spent an hour, yesterday, with A. W. Lamb, who was not married when I saw him last.  He married a young lady whom I knew.  And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters.  Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—­a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished.

That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled, the fire is gone out in its eyes, and the spring from its step.  It will be dust and ashes when I come again.  I have been clasping hands with the moribund —­and usually they said, “It is for the last time.”

Now I am under way again, upon this hideous trip to St. Paul, with a heart brimming full of thoughts and images of you and Susie and Bay and the peerless Jean.  And so good night, my love.

Saml.

Clemens’s trip had been saddened by learning, in New Orleans, the news of the death of Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh.  To Doctor Brown’s son, whom he had known as “Jock,” he wrote immediately on his return to Hartford.

To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh

Hartford, June 1, 1882.  My dear Mr. Brown,—­I was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in New Orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news among the cable dispatches.  There was no place in America, however remote, or however rich, or poor or high or humble where words of mourning for your father were not uttered that morning, for his works had made him known and loved all over the land.  To Mrs. Clemens and me, the loss is personal; and our grief the grief one feels for one who was peculiarly near and dear.  Mrs. Clemens has never ceased to express regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the Atlantic for the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes once more before he should be called to his rest.

We both thank you greatly for the Edinburgh papers which you sent.  My wife and I join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies.

                              Faithfully yours,
                                        S. L. Clemens.

Our Susie is still “Megalops.”  He gave her that name: 

Can you spare a photograph of your father?  We have none but the one taken in a group with ourselves.