I have just been writing to a friend in Hartford' who treated what I
imagine was a similar case surgically last fall, and produced a permanent
cure. If this is a like case, Charley must go to him.

If relief fails there, he must take the required rest, whether the
business can stand it or not.

It is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary,
I do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed. He can
grow up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.

It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time. They have to
put in some little time every day on their studies. Jean thinks she is
studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses; she
spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a
continuation of her Hartford system of culture.

With love from us all to you all.
Affectionately
SAM.


Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.
Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve
Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. He had a passion for
history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort. In his early life
he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties he
somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it.
A Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in