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Add to My Citations To W. C. Kimball and W. W. Kimball
26 April 1866 • Island of Maui, Sandwich Islands
(MS: Jacobs, UCCL 00098)
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Wailuku,1 Apr. 26.

Messrs Kimball2

Gentlemen—Don’t you think for a moment of going up on Haleakala without giving me an opportunity of accompanying you! I have waited for & skirmished after some company for some time without avail, & now I hear that you will shortly be at Haiku.3 So I shall wait for you.

Cannot you let me know, just as soon as you arrive, & give me a day or two (or more, even, if possible,) to get there in, with my horse? Because I am told the distance hence to Haiku is 15 miles—to prosecute which will be a matter of time, to my animal, & possibly a matter of eternity. His strong suit is grace & personal [ comi comeliness], rather than velocity.

Yours Very Truly,

Sam L. Clemens.

(Or “Mark Twain,” if you [ know m have forgotten ]my genuine name.)

{

My address is “Wailuku
Plantation.”




(Original.)

I shall send two or three notes for by different parties, for fear one might miss fire—an idea suggested by my own native sagacity.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 A town and district on the north coast of the island of Maui.

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2 Aged twenty-seven and thirty respectively, the Kimball brothers had been among Clemens’s fellow passengers aboard the Ajax. They departed Honolulu for San Francisco on 2 June aboard the bark D. C. Murray (Ajax passenger list, PH in CU-MARK; “Passengers,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 9 June 66, 2).

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3 A village on the coast of Maui on the route to the extinct volcano Haleakala, whose name means “House of the Sun” (MTH, 58). Clemens did not describe his visit to Haleakala for the Sacramento Union; he did so in chapter 76 of Roughing It, but without naming his companions.



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MS, collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, Dayton, Ohio.

glyphglyphPrevious publication:glyph L1, 335–336; Autographs and Modern Signed Editions. Catalogue 70 (Bridgewater, Mass.: Paul C. Richards Autographs, [1972]), item 174, with omissions.

glyphglyphProvenance:glyphVictor Jacobs acquired the MS from Paul C. Richards Autographs, which had acquired it from Rodney C. Eaton, a great-nephew of the Kimballs’. In 1971 Mr. Eaton sent a photographic facsimile of the MS to the Mark Twain Papers.

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comi comeliness • comieliness [‘e’ over ‘i’]

know m have forgotten • [‘have for’ over ‘know m’]