1 Melicent S. Holliday (b. 1800?) had lived in a mansion on Holliday’s Hill (Cardiff Hill in Clemens’s fiction) near Hannibal. After the Civil War she was reduced to “visiting” with friends, among them Jane Clemens and the Moffetts, whom she sometimes stayed with in St. Louis, without invitation (Inds, 325). Clemens’s telegram is known to survive only in this paraphrase by Annie Moffett Webster. He could have sent it soon after he realized the seriousness of Emma Nye’s illness—that is, at about the same time he wrote the previous letter to Ella Wolcott and the next one to Orion Clemens—or at any point before Nye died on 29 September.