1 December 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: ViU, UCCL 01158)
I remember your father very well indeed. His courtesies to us in Salt Lake City were of so pleasant a nature that even the fourteen years that have rolled by since have not sufficed to obliterate the memory of them.1explanatory note
And now after all this time I am to repay that debt with the base coin of an assumed name! But, you have asked it, & so—as the Persians say—on your head be it!2explanatory note
(alias) Mark Twain
Clemens and his brother Orion had met James Street (d. 1867), an agent for the Overland Telegraph Company, in 1861, when they stopped in Salt Lake City en route to Nevada Territory. Clemens later resumed his acquaintance with him in San Francisco. Street is portrayed sympathetically in chapters 13 and 14 of Roughing It ( RI 1993 , 92–96, 594–96), but his daughter’s given name, age, and present circumstances have not been determined.
For example, “On my head be your commands,” in “The Story of the Three Apples” in Edward William Lane’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights, published 1839–41 (Lane, 1:251). It wasn’t until 1877 that Clemens purchased the Lane translation, still a standard work then, but he doubtless was long familiar with it and may have had it in mind in alluding to the Arabian Nights in chapters 8, 13, 33, 34, and 44 of The Innocents Abroad (Gribben, 1:26).
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L6 , 299–300; Sweet, lot 34, brief paraphrase.
The MS, offered for sale in 1954 (Sweet), was deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.