editorial rooms of “the express,”
buffalo, Sept. 30 18 69.
Dear Mr. Holmes—
If I can get my pen to go along over this new-fangled cobble-stone paper without kicking up behind, (which I wish I had the author of it here,) I will acknowledge the receipt of your note & thank you heartily for your good words.1
Since you would like to know what excuse I had for sending you so large a book, Mr Holmes, I can easily furnish a good one. I [ have had ]read the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” two or three times already, when a superior young lady requested me a short time ago to read it again & mark it & marginal-note it all the way through for her., (Young ladies like that sort of thing)—they are the parties that damage the library books—& I did. Then I said in my secret soul, I have got a chance at this gentleman who writes Autocrats of Breakfast Tables & gives me extra work to do, & I will hurl my six hundred & fifty pages at him if I “fetch” the State if I miss him & “fetch” the State house! {N. B.—Elsie Venner is waiting to be marked—commission from the same party.}2
But speaking seriously, I so enjoyed reading the Autocrat the third time that I gave imposed the pleasant task upon myself of [ redin red reading ]it again & marking it without a suggestion from anybody. {Mem.—Am in the habit of marking books for the party mentioned a while ago.} I hadn’t any real “excuse,” but I sent the book just as a sort of unobtrusive [“Thank-you” ]for having given me so much pleasure often & over again. That is honest, as sure as
I am
Yours Most Truly
Samℓ. L. Clemens
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Holmes alluded to: Edward Robinson (1794–1863), American philologist, geographer, and biblical scholar,
author of Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841); Karl Richard Lepsius
(1810–84), German explorer and philologist, author of a number of books on Egypt; William Hepworth Dixon
(1821–79), English historian, author of The Holy Land (1865); and Mary Elizabeth Herbert
(1822–1911), Baroness Herbert of Lea, translator, novelist, travel writer, and religious biographer, author of Cradle Lands (1867), an account of travels in Egypt and the Holy Land. Clemens and David Ross Locke had visited
Holmes in Boston on 14 or 15 March 1869.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L3, 364–66.
Provenance:it is not known when DLC acquired the MS.
Emendations and textual notes:
have had • haved
redin red reading • redin redading [canceled ‘n’ partly formed]
“Thank-you” • “Thank-|you”
