Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Daniel Slote
7 August 1867 • Naples, Italy
(MS, not sent: TxU, UCCL 00143)

Click to add citation to My Citations.

{graphic group: 1 diagonal slash inline overlay}

7th Morning—I have paid this breakfast bill, Dan. Tell the Doctor, I am gone to The Island of Ischia—will return to Naples to-morrow—leave Herculaneum & Vesuvius alone till Thursday2—we don’t want to go with those inf3

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1The bill lists the following items: three bottles of beer (correctly, bière, bouteilles 3); water (eau); candle (chandelle); and breakfast (déjeuné).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 Since Clemens wrote this note on a Wednesday, he must have meant “Friday” here, instead of “Thursday”: Friday was in fact the day he returned from Ischia and visited Vesuvius (see the next letter).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 Clemens described the party that went to Ischia in an Alta dispatch as “two or three of us,” but its other members have not been identified (SLC 1867). Clemens stopped writing in the middle of a line and probably never gave or sent this note to Slote, perhaps because he found he could tell him what he had written, or intended to write. The note itself apparently remained in Clemens’s possession until his death: see the textual commentary for this letter.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, not sent, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (TxU). Albert Bigelow Paine had this MS in his possession at the time of his death, presumably having received it from Clemens; this fact suggests that Clemens never gave—and perhaps never even showed—his unfinished note to Slote. Paine wrote on the MS: “1867 (Quaker City trip) Mem. for ‘Dan’.”

glyph Previous publication: L2, 77–78; AAA / Anderson Galleries 1937, lot 68.

glyph Provenance:Paine owned the letter when he died in 1937; it is not known when TxU acquired it.