To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
5 May 1870 • Elmira, N.Y.
(Transcript: WU, UCCL 00461)

Elmira May 5

Friend Bliss—

We return home a week hence. We shall go to the Adirondacks with the Twichells. I would have published that bookseller in that New York town if I had remained in Buffalo—but here I only “loaf.”1

What went with the Sun paragraph you spoke of? (Your letter was not sealed & it was [gone. ]) Was it complimentary, or the reverse? Was it about me? I will bet I will make some of those people sick, yet.2

I telegraphed you to send statement & check here—did you get it? I have a bid for a book from a Philada subscription house3 offering unlimitedly.

Tell me what the Sun paragraph was, sure. Tell me right away.

Love to you & yours

Saml L Clemens

[ [letter docketed:] —70 ]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 The unidentified bookseller was probably selling copies of The Innocents Abroad purchased, contrary to company policy, from a subscription agent.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 Bliss’s letter is not known to survive. The clipping it enclosed and referred to was probably the following:

A dog, the property of Mr. M—— T——, a well-known writer, afforded on one occasion a remarkable instance of the sagacity of his race. His master was in the habit of giving him two pennies every morning at breakfast time, and sending him to buy a Sun of a newsboy. One morning the boy, having sold all his Suns, offered the dog a Daily Times. But the sagacious animal, knowing his master’s politics, wagged his tail, put out his tongue, and went to a news-shop to buy the needful journal. (“A Knowing Dog,” New York Sun, 30 Apr 70, 2, reprinting the Comic Monthly of unknown date)

The New York Sun, edited by Charles A. Dana, was a lively, somewhat sensational paper with increasingly conservative sympathies. The more staid New York Times, edited by Louis J. Jennings, was, like the Buffalo Express, a reformist Republican paper (Rowell, 692, 699; Mott 1950, 374–78, 382–84).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 Unidentified.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Transcript, handwritten by Dana Ayer, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).

Previous publication: L4, 125–126; MTLP, 36 n. 1, brief excerpt.

Provenance:The MS evidently remained among the American Publishing Company’s files until it was sold (and may have been at that time copied by Ayer; see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance). Its present location is not known. The Ayer transcription was in turn copied by a typist and both the handwritten and typed transcriptions are at WU.

Emendations and textual notes:

gone. • gone‸

[letter docketed:] —70 • [The year, which Ayer transcribed as part of the dateline, was probably the American Publishing Company’s docket; see, for example, the similar docket on 23 Apr 70 to Bliss.]