To William A. Seaver
20 May 1874 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: WU, UCCL 01090)

Elmira, May 20.

My Dear Clemens: ‸Seaver:‸

(That is the first time I have started to write a letter to myself for some time—I find simple soliloquizing easier, cheaper, quicker, & more uniformly satisfactory.)

Yes, but I do love you, still, but every time I am in New York it is only for a day & then I am encumbered with my tribe & can’t get a chance to visit. I ran down d alone, day before yesterday, on business, & expected to stay over & have a time with you & John Hay, but I got to the [ h ] Astor at 9. PM, & at midnight my business was completed—so I rushed for home long before you were up, in the morning.

I’m ever so much obliged to you for fixing up that thing for me—& if it don’t get into print I will curse other people, not you.1

Do you a “jokelet?” (Plainly this man is mad.) Can a person do jokelets when he is in labor with a book which it will take him 18 months to deliver himself of? However, if a jokelet should occur to me, & you would be willing to father it & hold me [freee ] from guilt, it is yours.

I hope to run through New York by & by, on my way to Hartford, leaving my tribe behind, & then I propose to assemble where there be refreshments, & tackle you.

Ys ever the same,

Samℓ L. Clemens.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Seaver had agreed to Clemens’s request of 1 May, possibly sending a draft of the remarks he planned to insert in Harper’s Monthly for July (1 May 74 to Seaver, n. 2).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).

Previous publication: L6, 149–150.

Provenance:Norman D. Bassett, a Madison alumnus, owned the MS by October 1942. He donated his Mark Twain collection to WU on 9 July 1955.

Emendations and textual notes:

h • [partly formed]

freee • [sic]