26 April 1866 • Island of Maui, Sandwich Islands (MS: Jacobs, UCCL 00098)
Gentlemen—Don’t you think for a moment of going up on Haleakala without giving me an opportunity of accompanying you! I have waited for & skirmished after some company for some time without avail, & now I hear that you will shortly be at Haiku.3explanatory note So I shall wait for you.
Cannot you let me know, just as soon as you arrive, & give me a day or two (or more, even, if possible,) to get there in, with my horse? Because I am told the distance hence to Haiku is 15 miles—to prosecute which will be a matter of time, to my animal, & possibly a matter of eternity. His strong suit is grace & personal comi comelinessⒶemendation, rather than velocity.
(Or “Mark Twain,” if you know m have forgotten Ⓐemendationmy genuine name.)
My address
is “Wailuku Plan-
tation.” parallel wavy lines
Ⓐemendation
(Original.)
I shall send two or three notes for by different parties, for fear one might miss fire—an idea suggested by my own native sagacity.
A town and district on the north coast of the island of Maui.
Aged twenty-seven and thirty respectively, the Kimball brothers had been among Clemens’s fellow passengers aboard the Ajax. They departed Honolulu for San Francisco on 2 June aboard the bark D. C. Murray (Ajax passenger list, PH in CU-MARK; “Passengers,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 9 June 66, 2).
A village on the coast of Maui on the route to the extinct volcano Haleakala, whose name means “House of the Sun” (MTH , 58). Clemens did not describe his visit to Haleakala for the Sacramento Union; he did so in chapter 76 of Roughing It, but without naming his companions.
MS, collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, Dayton, Ohio.
L1 , 335–336; Autographs and Modern Signed Editions. Catalogue 70 (Bridgewater, Mass.: Paul C. Richards Autographs, [1972]), item 174, with omissions.
Victor Jacobs acquired the MS from Paul C. Richards Autographs, which had acquired it from Rodney C. Eaton, a great-nephew of the Kimballs’. In 1971 Mr. Eaton sent a photographic facsimile of the MS to the Mark Twain Papers.