22 April 1882 • SS Gold Dust
en route from St. Louis, Mo., to Vicksburg, Miss. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 02204)
Livy darling, the swindle is all “p “up, .” & so Yesterday noon it came up cold, & I was driven to the pilot house to get warm. Got to talking with a little boy, son of a passenger, & presently felt the pilot’s eye on me. He had recognized my voice, after 21 years, though I did not remember him or his name either. He waited a while for confirmation of his suspicions; & presently when I raised my hat & passed my fingers up through my hair, he had no further doubts, & just called me by name. I confessed.
It would be nonsense to stop at Memphis, now, & fall a prey to the newspapers; so we shall stick to this boat to the bottom end of her voyage (Vicksburg), & then take a coast packet & go on to New Orleans. We shall reach Memphis tonight, & if I had the children along, we would turn out & hunt up Julia Koshloshky.
We are having a powerful good time & picking up & setting down volumes of literary stuff. I take a trick at the wheel occasionally, & find the mechanical work of steering a steamboat as familiar as if I had never ceased from it. But the “upper” river! It was as new to me [as] if I had never heard of it before. However, I recognize the river below c Cairo—I know it pretty fairly, though some of the changes are marvelous. For instance Island No. 10 used to be as close to shore as from our front door to Holbrook’s: now it lies away off across the water as far away as the Courant office. Of course the island is where it was, but the shore has been eaten away to that prodigious extent.
Telegraphed you from Cairo last night. Shall telegraph you from Memphis tomorrow morning.
Good bye, my darling Livy, & kiss everybody but Jean for me.
P. S. Well, Jean too.
Mrs. S. L. Clemens | Hartford | Conn on the flap: slc postmarked: memphis tenn. apr 23 10pm and rec’d. hartford conn. apr 26 10 am
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- 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
- Wecter, Dixon. The Love Letters of Mark Twain. Edited by Dixon Wecter. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1949
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Manuscript Letters Now in the Mark Twain Papers. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 11 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
MS, CU-MARK.
LLMT, 208–9; MicroML, reel 4.
See Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.