May 8 Friday – In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam added to his Apr. 7 to John Y. MacAlister that he discovered this day he’d forgotten to post.
May 8. Great Scott! I never mailed this letter! I addressed it, stamped it, put “Registered” on it—then left it lying unsealed on the arm of my chair, & rushed up to my bed quaking with a chill. I’ve never been out of the bed since—oh, bronchitis, rheumatism, two sets of teeth aching, land, I’ve had a randy time for 4 weeks. And to-day—great guns, one of the very worst!
A week & a half ago came a letter from my friend Col. Fairchild, in which he said, “if you haven’t received your dividend,” etc—which was odd, since I had acknowledged it (in this present unposted letter) about 3 weeks before. However I cabled the London office acknowledging receipt of the “cheques”—plural; I judged you would understand it to include the £35 from Lloyd’s Weekly.
To-day comes your cable “Silence distressing—write;” & for a time I wonder in what way I’ve been silent. There being no nurses watching, I climbed out & down stairs, & there lay the dam letter on the chair-arm, & as thoroughly unposted as it had been when I saw it last. I’m devilish sorry, & I do apologize—for although I am not as slow as you are about answering letters, as a rule, I see where I’m standing this time.
Meantime Mr. Rogers has returned & been operated on for appendicitis 2 or 3 weeks ago, & his wife telephones that he has been sitting up a little the last 2 or 3 days, & will sail for his summer home on his yacht to-morrow morning—& so, I shan’t see him for weeks to come.
Two weeks ago Jean was taken down with measles, & I haven’t been able to go to her & she hasn’t been able to come to me.
But Mrs. Clemens is making nice progress‘, & can stand alone a moment or two at a time.
Now I’ll post this [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Brander Matthews.
I’m still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness since I broke into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering—that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows jibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being—Dinmort; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist’s stage-properties—finished it & took up Quentin Durward, & finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the College of Journalism to sit under the lectures on English literature in Columbia University.
I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward? [MTP]. Note: Guy Mannering (1815) published anonymously by Sir Walter Scott; Quentin Durward (1823) also by Scott. See MTB 1198; which notes this letter was “evidently mislaid” and not mailed until June, 1910, after Twain’s death. Note: Gribbens estimates that this letter and Sam’s May 4, also to Matthews, consitute “Clemens’ most complete commentaries on Scott’s novels” [613].
The Hartford Courant, p.5, “Mark Twain’s House,” reported the sale of the Clemens’ home to Richard M. Bissell, “who recently came to Hartford from Chicago to become vice-president of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company….The sale was made through the agency of Franklin G. Whitmore.”