9 February 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: MoKHC, UCCL 00573)
Gentlemen:
The chromo came, & I did not notify you because I hoped to get time to write & print a notice, but no time ever comes to me . , except By all odds it is the pleasantest & happiest & truest picture I have seen for many a day. It holds the place of honor in my study.1explanatory note
This is all in haste. I am simply out of the sick room for a moment’s rest & respite. My wife’s life (a year & 7 days married) is only hanging by a thread. wife is seriously & I am afraid even dangerously ill. 2explanatory note You will excuse my long delay in responding to your kind compliment.
The chromolithograph perhaps was one of Prang and Company’s “latest publications”—“Mt. Chocorua” and “North Conway Meadows,” reproduced from paintings by Benjamin Champney (1817–1907), a well-known landscapist (advertisement, Every Saturday, n.s., 2 [4 Feb 71]: 112). The present endorsement was Clemens’s substitute for the contemplated notice.
With typhoid fever, probably diagnosed already although not identified in Clemens’s extant letters for nearly two weeks (22 Feb 71 to Reidclick to open link). The disease had taken Emma Nye’s life in September 1870.
References
- Hallmark Cards, Kansas City, Mo.
- 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
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the collection of Hallmark Cards, Kansas City (MoKHC).
L4 , 329–330.