10 December 1872 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: Karanovich, UCCL 11669)
Your letter of Nov. 62explanatory note has this day reached me, by the way of London. I left there 4 only a day or two after you wrote it, so I met it somewhere in mid-ocean.
I am sorry it failed to come to hand while I was on the other side; I would have brought the package with pleasure. However, unless you are want it right away I can bring it yet, because I am going back there in May. If you were an Englishman that would be time enough, but Americans are not quite so patient.
Mrs. Mary Hunter Smith, | 1215 Chesnut street | St Louis | Mo. postmarked hartford conn. dec 11 ◇◇◇Ⓐemendation
Mary Berkeley Hunter Smith (b. 1830?) could claim cousinship to Clemens: her younger sister, Ella Hunter, was married to James Andrew Hays Lampton, half-brother of Jane Lampton Clemens. Smith was married to Arden Richard Smith (b. 1825?), an Englishman who settled in St. Louis about 1849 and be came an editor on the St. Louis Missouri Republican. By 1869 he was listed in the St. Louis directory as a principal in the firm of Scott and Smith, auctioneers. The Smiths’ son, who took the name Edwin Hunter Pendleton Arden (1864–1918), became a prominent actor and playwright. The St. Louis address on the envelope accompanying this letter—1215 Chesnut Street—was near the residence of the Moffett-Clemens household in the late 1860s, at 1312 Chesnut Street. In 1886, in writing to Clemens, Arden Smith would refer to their “old Missouri acquaintance and the family friendship” (Smith to SLC, 2 Dec 86, CU-MARK; St. Louis Census, 291; L1 , 15 n. 7, 19 n. 3; Inds , 330; Edwards, 705, 723).
Not extant.
MS, collection of Nicholas Karanovich.
L5 , 250–251; Lilly Library, 13.