Hon. Anson Burlingame, U. S. Minister to China, and
Gen. Van Valkenburgh, Minister to Japan, with their
families and suites, have just arrived here en route.
They were going to do me the honor to call on me this
morning, and that accounts for my being out of bed
now. You know what condition my room is always
in when you are not around—so I climbed
out of bed and dressed and shaved pretty quick and
went up to the residence of the American Minister
and called on them. Mr. Burlingame told me a
good deal about Hon. Jere Clemens and that Virginia
Clemens who was wounded in a duel. He was in
Congress years with both of them. Mr. B. sent
for his son, to introduce him—said he could
tell that frog story of mine as well as anybody.
I told him I was glad to hear it for I never tried
to tell it myself without making a botch of it.
At his request I have loaned Mr. Burlingame pretty
much everything I ever wrote. I guess he will
be an almighty wise man by the time he wades through
that lot.
If the New United States Minister to the Sandwich
Islands (Hon. Edwin McCook,) were only here now, so
that I could get his views on this new condition of
Sandwich Island politics, I would sail for California
at once. But he will not arrive for two weeks
yet and so I am going to spend that interval on the
island of Kauai.
I stopped three days with Hon. Mr. Cony, Deputy Marshal
of the Kingdom, at Hilo, Hawaii, last week and by
a funny circumstance he knew everybody that I ever
knew in Hannibal and Palmyra. We used to sit
up all night talking and then sleep all day.
He lives like a Prince. Confound that Island!
I had a streak of fat and a streak of lean all over
it—got lost several times and had to sleep
in huts with the natives and live like a dog.
Of course I couldn’t speak fifty words of the
language. Take it
altogether, though, it was a mighty hard trip.
Yours
Affect.
Sam.
Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh were
on their way to their posts, and their coming
to the islands just at this time proved a most important
circumstance to Mark Twain. We shall come to
this presently, in a summary of the newspaper
letters written to the Union. June 27th
he wrote to his mother and sister a letter, only a
fragment of which survives, in which he tells
of the arrival in Honolulu of the survivors of
the ship Hornet, burned on the line, and of his
securing the first news report of the lost vessel.
Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:
Copyrights
Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 1 (1835-1866) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
