My address
is “Wailuku
Plantation.”
To
W. C. Kimball and W. W. Kimball
26 April 1866 • Island of Maui, Sandwich Islands
(MS: Jacobs, UCCL 00098)
Click to add citation to My Citations.
Wailuku,1 Apr. 26.
Messrs Kimball2—
Gentlemen—Don’t you think for a moment of going up on Haleakala without giving me an opportunity of accompanying you! I have waited for & skirmished after some company for some time without avail, & now I hear that you will shortly be at Haiku.3 So I shall wait for you.
Cannot you let me know, just as soon as you arrive, & give me a day or two (or more, even, if possible,) to get there in, with my horse? Because I am told the distance hence to Haiku is 15 miles—to prosecute which will be a matter of time, to my animal, & possibly a matter of eternity. His strong suit is grace & personal [ comi comeliness], rather than velocity.
Yours Very Truly,
Sam L. Clemens.
(Or “Mark Twain,” if you [ know m have forgotten ]my genuine name.)
‸
{
‸
(Original.)
I shall send two or three notes for by different parties, for fear one might miss fire—an idea suggested by my own native sagacity.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
A town and district on the north coast of the island of Maui.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
Aged twenty-seven and thirty respectively, the Kimball brothers had
been among Clemens’s fellow passengers aboard the Ajax. They departed Honolulu for San
Francisco on 2 June aboard the bark D. C.
Murray (Ajax passenger list, PH in CU-MARK;
“Passengers,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 9 June 66, 2).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
A village on the coast of Maui on the route to the extinct volcano
Haleakala, whose name means “House of the Sun”
(MTH, 58). Clemens did not describe his visit to Haleakala for the
Sacramento Union; he did so in chapter 76 of Roughing It, but without naming his
companions.
Source text(s):MS, collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, Dayton, Ohio.
Previous publication:
L1, 335–336; Autographs and Modern Signed
Editions. Catalogue 70 (Bridgewater, Mass.: Paul C. Richards
Autographs, [1972]), item 174, with omissions.
Provenance:Victor Jacobs acquired the MS from Paul C. Richards Autographs, which had
acquired it from Rodney C. Eaton, a great-nephew of the
Kimballs’. In 1971 Mr. Eaton sent a photographic facsimile of the
MS to the Mark Twain Papers.
Emendations and textual notes:
comi comeliness • comieliness [‘e’ over ‘i’]
know m have forgotten • [‘have for’ over ‘know m’]
