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

To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
per Telegraph Operator
17 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS, copy received: NN-B, UCCL 00550)

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[the western union telegraph company.]

2059
dated

Buffalo N.Y.

1870
received at

3 20 Dec 17
to

E. Bliss Jr.

149 Asylum St.

Got homesick. Will come shortly with sketches & manuscript.1 Send me right away New York draft for fifteen hundred dollars payable to James H. Riley.2 He starts in ten days.

Saml L. Clemens

29 pd N

[telegram docketed:] check mark [and] Mark Twain | Dec 17/70

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The sketches were for a volume that Clemens and Bliss must have discussed in New York; their 29 December contract for it is transcribed in ET&S1, 435. The manuscript was a sample of Roughing It.

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2 Actually John Henry Riley. See 20 Dec 70 to Bliss, n. 3.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, copy received, telegram blank filled out in the hand of a telegraph operator, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).

glyph Previous publication: L4, 272–273; AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 125, excerpt; AAA/Anderson 1935, lot 101, excerpt.

glyph Provenance:The telegram, apparently part of the William K. Bixby Collection, was sold in 1934 and again in 1935. It is not known when the MS became part of the Berg Collection, given by Dr. Albert A. Berg to NN in 1940 but continuously enlarged since then.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

the . . . company. • [words on telegram blank identical to those reported in the commentary for 7 Nov 70 to Langdon]