To Orion Clemens
9 September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00504)

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Buf. 9th.

My Dear Bro—

O here! I don’t want to be consulted at all about Tenn. I don’t want it even mentioned to [me. When ]I make a suggestion it is for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to ask my advice, opinion or consent about that hated property. My If it was because I felt the slightest personal interest in the infernal land that I ever made a suggestion, the suggestion would never be made.

Do exactly as you please with the land—always remembering this: that so trivial a percentage as ten per cent will never sell it. It is only a bid for a somnambulist.

I have no time to turn round. A young lady visitor (schoolmate of Livy’s) is dying in the house of typhoid fever (parents are in South Carolina) & the premises are full of nurses & doctors & we are all fagged out.1

Yrs E

Sam

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Among the nurses were one, and possibly two, of Emma Nye’s Elmira friends. On 8 September 1870, Thomas K. Beecher wrote Ella Wolcott: “Allie Spaulding has gone to take care of her, and if the illness continues Julia [his wife, Julia Jones Beecher] will go to relieve her when she gets tired” (CtHSD). Alice Spaulding, Olivia Langdon, and Emma Nye had been among the pupils in Mrs. Beecher’s Sunday School class in the late 1850s and early 1860s (L3, 506). As the monogram indicates, Clemens used a sheet of Nye’s stationery for this letter.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).

Previous publication: L4, 193; MTL, 1:176–77.

Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

me. When • me.—|When