June 25.
My Dear Howells:
I told Patrick1 to get some carpenters & box the machine & send it to you—& found
that Bliss had sent for the machine & carried it off.2 I have been talking to you & writing to you as if you
were present when I traded the machine to Bliss for a twelve-dollar saddle worth $25 (cheating him
outrageously, of course—but conscience got the upper hand again & I told him before I left the
premises that I’d pay for the saddle if he didn’t like the machine—on condition that he
donate said machine to a charity)——but now I began to suspect that you never had heard that
conversation;
(which suspicion Dan, who was present, confirms, & says it was Joaquin
Miller that was with us, & not you.3 And that is perfectly true. I remember it now, perfectly well, though I have
bellites upon the heels of the Presbyterians,.
[at bottom of page:
B-14
had the impression all this time that it was you. This was a little over five weeks
ago—so I had long ago concluded that Bliss didn’t want the machine & did want the saddle—wherefore I jumped at the chance of shoving the machine off onto
you,
—saddle or no saddle, so I got the blamed thing out of my sight.
The saddle hangs on Tara’s walls down below in the stable5 & the machine is at Bliss’s, grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly [& ]implacably rotting way another ch man’s chances for salvation.
I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn), but to let me know when he has got his dose, because I’ve got another candidate for damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks & if you don’t see the Type-Writer come tilting along toward Cambridge with the raging hell of an unsatisfied appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.6
Don’t you be mad about this blunder, Howells—it only comes of a bad memory & the stupidity which is inseparable from true genius. Nothing intentionally criminal in it.
Mrs. Clemens is still sick abed but getting along very promisingly & satisfactorily.
One of these days let’s run down to Washington for a day. I’ve a moment’s business with the President——haven’t you?7
Yrs Ever
Mark.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
” (SLC 1982, 2:572). Clemens first crossed out these words, and then canceled the entire page
B-13, inserting a new sentence at the top to end the chapter. The Campbellites were followers of father and son
Thomas (1763–1854) and Alexander (1788–1866) Campbell, who advocated individual
interpretation of the Bible. Clemens’s father, John Marshall Clemens, was a Campbellite sympathizer;
Clemens’s sister, Pamela, belonged to the sect in her youth (Inds, 288).
The harp that once, through Tara’s halls, The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls As if that soul were fled.
(Moore, 10)
The Clemenses’ Tara was a pony.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 499–501; MTL, 1:257, with omissions; MTHL, 1:89–90.
Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
& • & & [corrected miswriting]
