9 September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00504)
O here! I don’t want to be consulted at all about Tenn. I don’t want it even mentioned to me. When ⒶemendationI make a suggestion it is for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to ask my advice, opinion or consent about that hated property. My If it was because I felt the slightest personal interest in the infernal land that I ever made a suggestion, the suggestion would never be made.
Do exactly as you please with the land—always remembering this: that so trivial a percentage as ten per cent will never sell it. It is only a bid for a somnambulist.
I have no time to turn round. A young lady visitor (schoolmate of Livy’s) is dying in the house of typhoid fever (parents are in South Carolina) & the premises are full of nurses & doctors & we are all fagged out.1explanatory note
Among the nurses were one, and possibly two, of Emma Nye’s Elmira friends. On 8 September 1870, Thomas K. Beecher wrote Ella Wolcott: “Allie Spaulding has gone to take care of her, and if the illness continues Julia [his wife, Julia Jones Beecher] will go to relieve her when she gets tired” (CtHSD). Alice Spaulding, Olivia Langdon, and Emma Nye had been among the pupils in Mrs. Beecher’s Sunday School class in the late 1850s and early 1860s ( L3 , 506). As the monogram indicates, Clemens used a sheet of Nye’s stationery for this letter.
References
- Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- Stowe-Day Memorial Library and Historical Foundation, Hartford, Conn.
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3: 1869. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Dahlia Armon. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1992
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L4 , 193; MTL , 1:176–77.
see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.