Mark Twain in Nevada Fair. On May 23, 1864 Twain wrote to Ellen G. (Mrs. William K.) Cutler, a signer of the letter blasting the author of the miscegenation hoax. He apologized for not responding sooner to the letter as it "came at a moment when I was in the midst of what ought to have been a deadly quarrel with the publishers of the Union". Mrs. Cutler was the only one among the Carson City society ladies that had not ostracized Mollie Clemens, for which Twain thanked her. Twain promised that he would "say a word or two to show the ladies that
Old English eth is replaced by thorn). In contrast with Modern English orthography, that of Old English was reasonably regular, with a mostly predictable correspondence between letters and phonemes. There were not usually any silent letters—in the word "cniht", for example, both the and were pronounced, unlike the and in the modern "knight". The following table lists the Old English letters and digraphs together with the phonemes they represent, using the same notation as in the Phonology section above. Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives /, and cannot be voiced. Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent