per Telegraph Operator
8?–29 September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Paraphrase: MTBus , 49–50, UCCL 11806)
When we moved to Fredonia about ten years after this and my grandmother was rather lonely at first, we consoled her by saying, “At any rate, Mrs. Holliday will never visit us here.” But the first thing we knew we had a telegram from Uncle Sam, who had recently married and was living in Buffalo, saying to expect her. She had turned up at his house but as someone was very ill there he had not permitted her to get out of the cab but had given her fifty dollars and sent her on to us.1explanatory note
Melicent S. Holliday (b. 1800?) had lived in a mansion on Holliday’s Hill (Cardiff Hill in Clemens’s fiction) near Hannibal. After the Civil War she was reduced to “visiting” with friends, among them Jane Clemens and the Moffetts, whom she sometimes stayed with in St. Louis, without invitation ( Inds , 325). Clemens’s telegram is known to survive only in this paraphrase by Annie Moffett Webster. He could have sent it soon after he realized the seriousness of Emma Nye’s illness—that is, at about the same time he wrote the previous letter to Ella Wolcott and the next one to Orion Clemens—or at any point before Nye died on 29 September.
References
- Webster, Samuel Charles. Mark Twain, Business Man. Edited by Samuel Charles Webster. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1946
- 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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories. Foreword and notes by Dahlia Armon and Walter Blair. Texts established by Dahlia Armon, Paul Baender, Walter Blair, William M. Gibson, and Franklin R. Rogers. The Mark Twain Library. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1989
per Telegraph Operator • Buffalo, N.Y. • UCCL 11806
Paraphrase, MTBus , 49–50.
L4 , 192–193.