25 June 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02491)
I told Patrick1explanatory note to get some carpenters & box the machine & send it to you—& found that Bliss had sent for the machine & carried it off.2explanatory note I have been talking to you & writing to you as if you were present when I traded the machine to Bliss for a twelve-dollar saddle worth $25 (cheating him outrageously, of course—but conscience got the upper hand again & I told him before I left the premises that I’d pay for the saddle if he didn’t like the machine—on condition that he donate said machine to a charity)——but now I began to suspect that you never had heard that conversation; (which suspicion Dan, who was present, confirms, & says it was Joaquin Miller that was with us, & not you.3explanatory note And that is perfectly true. I remember it now, perfectly well, though I have B-14 | bellites upon the heels of the Presbyterians,.4explanatory note had the impression all this time that it was you. This was a little over five weeks ago—so I had long ago concluded that Bliss didn’t want the machine & did want the saddle—wherefore I jumped at the chance of shoving the machine off onto you, —saddle or no saddle, so I got the blamed thing out of my sight.
The saddle hangs on Tara’s walls down below in the stable5explanatory note & the machine is at Bliss’s, grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly & Ⓐemendationimplacably rotting way another ch man’s chances for salvation.
I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn), but to let me know when he has got his dose, because I’ve got another candidate for damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks & if you don’t see the Type-Writer come tilting along toward Cambridge with the raging hell of an unsatisfied appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.6explanatory note
Don’t you be mad about this blunder, Howells—it only comes of a bad memory & the stupidity which is inseparable from true genius. Nothing intentionally criminal in it.
Mrs. Clemens is still sick abed but getting along very promisingly & satisfactorily.
One of these days let’s run down to Washington for a day. I’ve a moment’s business with the President——haven’t you?7explanatory note
McAleer.
Clemens answered Howells’s postcard of 23 June (see 21 June 75 to Howells, n. 3click to open link).
See pp. 486–88. Clemens took Miller and Wright to call on Elisha Bliss, probably between 25 and 28 May. All three authors may have had business to transact: in 1874 Bliss had published Miller’s Unwritten History: Life amongst the Modocs; he was currently producing Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old; and he planned to publish Wright’s Big Bonanza, still a work in progress. Wright reported to his sister, “I like what I have seen of Mr Bliss, of the American Publishing Company. He is not straight-laced” (2 and 3 June 75, CU-BANC).
Clemens reused a leaf, numbered B-14, discarded from the manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This canceled fragment completed a sentence begun near the bottom of page B-13 (also numbered 572), at the end of chapter 22: “As usual, the first revival had bred a second, the second a third, and so on, the Presbyterians following close upon the heels of the Methodists, & the Camp-‖” (SLC 1982, 2:572). Clemens first crossed out these words, and then canceled the entire page B-13, inserting a new sentence at the top to end the chapter. The Campbellites were followers of father and son Thomas (1763–1854) and Alexander (1788–1866) Campbell, who advocated individual interpretation of the Bible. Clemens’s father, John Marshall Clemens, was a Campbellite sympathizer; Clemens’s sister, Pamela, belonged to the sect in her youth (Inds, 288).
An allusion to the first stanza of one of Thomas Moore’s “Irish Melodies”:
The harp that once, through Tara’s halls, The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls As if that soul were fled.(Moore, 10)
The Clemenses’ Tara was a pony.
For the fate of the typewriter, see 4 Nov 75 to Howells, n. 7click to open link, and 5 Nov 75 to Bliss, n. 5click to open link.
Clemens’s “business” with Ulysses S. Grant might have been to enlist his support for a new copyright law or for the admission of Samuel Moffett to the naval academy (see 18 Sept 75 to Howellsclick to open link and 22 Dec 75 to PAMclick to open link).
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden. Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 499–501; MTL , 1:257, with omissions; MTHL , 1:89–90.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.