Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern,
a pattern that never materially changes, in form and
substance, yet I cannot get used to that letter—it
always astonishes me. It affects me as the locomotive
always affects me: I saw to myself, “I
have seen you a thousand times, you always look the
same way, yet you are always a wonder, and you are
always impossible; to contrive you is clearly beyond
human genius—you can’t exist, you
don’t exist, yet here you are!”
I have a letter of that kind by me, a very old one.
I yearn to print it, and where is the harm?
The writer of it is dead years ago, no doubt, and
if I conceal her name and address—her this-world
address —I am sure her shade will not mind.
And with it I wish to print the answer which I wrote
at the time but probably did not send. If it
went—which is not likely—it went
in the form of a copy, for I find the original still
here, pigeonholed with the said letter. To that
kind of letters we all write answers which we do not
send, fearing to hurt where we have no desire to hurt;
I have done it many a time, and this is doubtless
a case of the sort.
X------, California, June 3, 1879.
Mr. S. L. Clemens, Hartford, Conn.:
Dear Sir,—You will doubtless be surprised
to know who has presumed to write and ask a favor
of you. Let your memory go back to your days
in the Humboldt mines—’62-’63.
You will remember, you and Clagett and Oliver and
the old blacksmith Tillou lived in a lean-to which
was half-way up the gulch, and there were six log
cabins in the camp —strung pretty well
separated up the gulch from its mouth at the desert
to where the last claim was, at the divide. The
lean-to you lived in was the one with a canvas roof
that the cow fell down through one night, as told
about by you in ROUGHING it—my uncle
Simmons remembers it very well. He lived in the
principal cabin, half-way up the divide, along with
Dixon and Parker and Smith. It had two rooms,
one for kitchen and the other for bunks, and was the
only one that had. You and your party were there
on the great night, the time they had dried-apple-pie,
Uncle Simmons often speaks of it. It seems curious
that dried-apple-pie should have seemed such a great
thing, but it was, and it shows how far Humboldt was
out of the world and difficult to get to, and how slim
the regular bill of fare was. Sixteen years ago—it
is a long time. I was a little girl then, only
fourteen. I never saw you, I lived in Washoe.
But Uncle Simmons ran across you every now and then,
all during those weeks that you and party were there
working your claim which was like the rest.
The camp played out long and long ago, there wasn’t
silver enough in it to make a button. You never
saw my husband, but he was there after you left, and
