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"Susie" in most of the earlier letters.]--Clemens's third birthday,
certainly a pretty picture, and as sweet and luminous and tender
today as it was forty years ago-as it will be a hundred years hence,
if these lines should survive that long. The letter is to her uncle
Charles Langdon, the "Charlie" of the Quaker City. "Atwater" was
associated with the Langdon coal interests in Elmira. "The play"
is, of course, "The Gilded Age."
*
****
To Charles Langdon, in Elmira:
Mch. 19, 1875.
DEAR CHARLIE,--Livy, after reading your letter, used her severest form
of expression about Mr. Atwater--to wit: She did not "approve" of
his conduct. This made me shudder; for it was equivalent to Allie
Spaulding's saying "Mr. Atwater is a mean thing;" or Rev. Thomas
Beecher's saying "Damn that Atwater," or my saying "I wish Atwater was
three hundred million miles in----!"
However, Livy does not often get into one of these furies, God be
thanked.
351
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