To Mathew B. Cox
24 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(Transcript and paraphrase: Argus, UCCL 10990)

buffalo, Sept. 24, 186 9.

[paraphrase: to Capt. M. B. Cox, San Francisco, introducing to him Prof. Ford and Charles F. Langdon, of Elmira, New York,] [who ]are bound around the globe on a pleasure trip ... Don’t tell them how you used to mix the cocktails at 7 bells, [& ]give mine to me in my berth, like the very best old rascal in the world, as you are. And don’t tell them about Mrs. Sherwood & those other ladies putting flour on my pillow the night of the 1st April1 ... & do you remember the night of the [“Equinoctial storm” ]which I put into poetry?2 I can’t think of that long, bewitching exquisite voyage without going into ecstacies of pleasurable [feeling.]

. . . .

[Yours for a thousand years,

Mark Twain.]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Mathew Bold Cox, superintendent of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s docks in San Francisco, was Clemens’s companion and cabin mate during his voyage from New York to San Francisco in the spring of 1868. Mrs. Sherwood, along with her two children and a nurse, was also among the passengers. Her practical joke on the night of 1 April, the final night of the journey, occurred aboard the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s Sacramento, which made the Panama to San Francisco leg of the trip (L2, 235–36; “Passengers Sailed,” New York Tribune, 12 Mar 68, 3; “Arrival of the Sacramento,” San Francisco Times, 3 Apr 68, 1).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 “Ye Equinoctial Storm,” Clemens’s poem about a night of revelry aboard the Sacramento, remained unpublished until 1884, when it appeared in the San Francisco Wasp (SLC 1884).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Transcript and paraphrase, Argus, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).

Previous publication: L3, 357.

Provenance:The Argus Book Shop offered the MS for sale in a 1939 letter to George Brownell. He evidently did not purchase it, although he kept the letter describing it; see Brownell Collection, pp. 581–82. The present location of the MS is not known.

Emendations and textual notes:

who • “who

& • and [also at 357.10, 11]

“Equinoctial storm” • ‘Equinoctial storm’

feeling. • feeling.” etc.

Yours ... Twain. • Subscribed and signed, “Yours for a thousand years, Mark Twain.”