3? March 1866 • San Francisco, Calif. (Paraphrase: William R. Gillis, 43, UCCL 00095)
I Ⓐemendationam leaving San Francisco in a short time for Sandwich ⒶemendationIslands in company with a party of U. S. surveyors, as special correspondent of the Alta California.1explanatory note As in the course of human events we may not meet again, I will unburden my conscience of a load it has been carrying ever since the night of the serenade you and your band of troubadors attempted to give me. When you came into the cabin after I had scared the other boys off the hill, I was in a mighty ugly mood and I wanted just the chance you gave me to vent my spleen on somebody or something. I called you some pretty hard names, which I knew at the time were undeserved, and accused you of high crimes and misdemeanors of which I knew you were not guilty. I wanted to ask your pardon the next morning when you called me to breakfast, but courage failed me and I put off doing so to a more “convenient season.” ⒶemendationThat season has now arrived, and I do ask you to forgive me. Tell the boys that I am often with them in my dreams, and that when I return to the city I will come back to them once more on Old Jackass, if I can possibly arrange to do so.Ⓐemendation 2explanatory note
Gillis introduced this paraphrase with these words: “Just previous to his departure for Honolulu I received a letter from Sam, which ended as nearly as I can now remember, as follows” (William R. Gillis, 43). In fact, Gillis’s recollection of the passage was uneven, and at times mistaken. Clemens, unaccompanied by any surveyors, toured the Sandwich Islands as correspondent for the Sacramento Union. He probably wrote the letter represented here around 3 March, by which date he had made public his acceptance of the assignment (see 20 Jan 66 to JLC and PAM, n. 8click to open letter).
The “serenade” occurred in late 1864 or early 1865, while Clemens was visiting at Jackass Hill, California. Sixty years later William Gillis recalled,
Getting into Tuttletown at a rather late hour one night on my way home from Sonora, I found a party of half a dozen young men who had been serenading their lady friends in the neighborhood. I suggested that they go with me to Jackass Hill and end the night’s program with a serenade to Mark Twain. They readily fell in with my suggestion and we climbed the hill together, and, after our chief musician had tuned up his “old banjo,” lined up under Mark’s window, and opened up with “Oh, Darkies, hab you seen Ole Massa?”
We had finished this song and “Happy Land O’Canaan” and were well under way with “I’se Gwine to de Shuckin,” when that window went up with a bang, and an angry, rasping voice snarled out, “What do you lot of yapping coyotes mean by disturbing the peace and quiet of the respectable people on the hill with that infernal yowling you’re doing out there? Get away from this window, you drunken loafers, and go off to that shuckin you’re howling about, and go right now.”
This rude reception, it is needless to say, put an abrupt ending to our serenade and my companions left the hill on the double quick. On entering the cabin I found Mark sitting on the side of the bed, cramming his pipe with “Bull Durham” tobacco. “Hello, Sam,” said I, “going to have a smoke?”
At my salutation he looked at me with an ugly scowl and greeted me with, “Billy, how did you come to get drunk tonight, and bring that gang of low down rowdies on the hill, to make the night hideous with their horrible racket? Up to this time I have regarded you as a well-behaved, behaved, decent young fellow with instincts somewhat approaching those of a gentleman but I have been wakened from that dream tonight to find you nothing but a common, wine guzzling hoodlum.” (William R. Gillis, 38–39)
Paraphrase in William R. Gillis, 43.
L1 , 332–333; William R. Gillis, Gold Rush Days with Mark Twain (New York: Boni, 1930), 75–76, a later edition of the same paraphrase with minor variants that are without authority.
unknown.