To William Dean Howells
29 May 1877 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NN-BGC, UCCL 02509)

slc/mtfarmington avenue, hartford.

May 29.

Confound you, Joe Twichell & I roamed about Bermuda day & night & never ceased to gabble & [enjoy. About] half the talk was—“It is a burning shame that Howells isn’t here;” “Nobody could get at the very meat & marrow of this pervading charm & deliciousness like Howells;” “How Howells would revel in the quaintness, & the simplicity of this people & the Sabbath repose of this land!” “What an imperishable sketch Howells would make of Capt. West the whaler, & Capt. Hope with the patient, pathetic face, wanderer in all the oceans for 43 years, lucky in none; coming home defeated once more, ‸now,‸ minus his ship—resigned, uncomplaining, being used to this;” “What a rattling chapter Howells would make out of the small boy Alfred, with his alert eye & military brevity & exactness of speech; & out of the old landlady; & her sacred onions; & the visiting & her daughter; & the visiting clergyman; & the ancient pianos of Hamilton & the venerable music in vogue there—& forty other things which we shall leave untouched or touch but lightly upon, we not being worthy;” “Dam Howells for not being here!” (this usually from me, not Twichell.)1

O, your insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day! If you had gone with us & let me pay the $50 ‸which‸ the trip, & the board & the various nick-nacks & [mementoes] the excursion would cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written, whereas I can now write only one or two & am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. Ponder these things. Lord, what a perfectly bewitching excursion it was! I traveled under an assumed name & was never molested with a polite attention from anybody.2 Love to you all.

Yrs Ever

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1Clemens discussed several of these subjects in “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” his account of the Bermuda trip, published in four installments in the Atlantic Monthly from October 1877 through January 1878 (SLC 1877–78a): “Capt. West the whaler,” called Tom Bowling in October, November, and December;“ Capt. Hope with the patient pathetic face,” called Captain Brace in November; the “ancient pianos of Hamilton & the venerable music in vogue there” and “the small boy Alfred” in January. He extolled Bermuda’s onions in December, but made no mention of his Hamilton boarding-house landlady, Mary Ann Kirkham, and her daughter Emily, or of the “visiting clergyman”—if he was someone other than Twichell (Hoffmann 2006, 35).

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2Clemens returned to New York from Bermuda on 27 May. He spent that night in routine quarantine aboard the S.S. Bermuda and arrived in Hartford the next day (“Marine Intelligence,” New York Times, 28 May 1877, 8;“ From Bermuda,” Hartford Courant, 29 May 1877, 2).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, NN-BGC.

Previous publication:

MTL, 1:294–95; MTHL, 1:178–79.

Provenance:

See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

enjoy. About • enjoy.— | About

mementoes • memen- | totoes [corrected miswriting]