Barb Schmidt's question about Gerald Thayer brought to mind something I knocked
 around in my head early in my research. What was the relationship between SLC
and Emma Beach? The only thing I've seen in print is the article Barb mentioned
 which is less an article than a reprinting of SLC's letters to Beach.  The
author grants the assumption -- from SLC through Paine and thence writ in stone
 -- that, since SLC fell in love with Livy Langdon via an ivory miniature off
of Smyrna, he had no interest in the sweet Emma, certainly a woman 'with a
fortune to love.' Then, eight months pass between the time SLC meets Langdon in
 New York around New Year's 1868 and the time he goes to Elmira for the first
time. During those eight months he doesn't write Livy, mention Livy, or as far
as any evidence offers, think about Livy (except perhaps during an interim trip
 to Hartford, where he stays with the Hooker's, whose daughter Alice is an old
friend.  On the other hand, he does see Emma Beach pretty often. Reading his
letters to her, I was struck by their similarity in rhetoric and tone to the
courtship letters SLC sent Livy a few months later. If I had to venture a guess
 -- and I do have to; it's part of my job writing a bio of SLC -- I'd say SLC
had the idea of pursuing Emma Beach, an idea he messed up by publishing his
diatribe against the _Quaker City_ 'funeral procession without a corpse,' for
which Emma's father Moses dressed him down.  Anybody have anything anywhere,
excluding SLC's improbable story of falling in love with Livy Langdon's picture
 off Smyrna, that might shed some light on this possible romantic interest? I
haven't found enough of anything on Emma's side of the story to give me any
insight into what happened between them, if anything.
                                                        Andy Hoffman