.
It was completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to
Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings. Everything
was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils. Even the
servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked.

It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise
out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is always watching a
chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to
reveal it.

However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may have
wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and
could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or
that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have
planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. If only the
Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! But these were
all incalculable things. All that he could be sure of was the coming of
his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
between.

At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the intervening days did
not matter. He could join in the busy preparations; he could write
exuberantly to his friends. To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he
sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the
slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently
belongs here:

Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.

DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere
among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my
heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it
shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat
around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from
the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my
note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
dollars for it--I was just that b