24 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Transcript and paraphrase: Argus, UCCL 10990)
evening express $8 per annum. no. 14 east swan street.
weekly express $1.50 per annum.
paraphrase: to Capt. M. B. Cox, San Francisco, introducing to him Prof. Ford and Charles F. Langdon, of Elmira, New York, who Ⓐemendationare bound around the globe on a pleasure trip ... Don’t tell them how you used to mix the cocktails at 7 bells, & Ⓐemendationgive mine to me in my berth, like the very best old rascal in the world, as you are. And don’t tell them about Mrs. Sherwood & those other ladies putting flour on my pillow the night of the 1st April1explanatory note ... & do you remember the night of the “Equinoctial storm” Ⓐemendationwhich I put into poetry?2explanatory note I can’t think of that long, bewitching exquisite voyage without going into ecstacies of pleasurable feeling.Ⓐemendation
Mathew Bold Cox, superintendent of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s docks in San Francisco, was Clemens’s companion and cabin mate during his voyage from New York to San Francisco in the spring of 1868. Mrs. Sherwood, along with her two children and a nurse, was also among the passengers. Her practical joke on the night of 1 April, the final night of the journey, occurred aboard the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s Sacramento, which made the Panama to San Francisco leg of the trip ( L2 , 235–36; “Passengers Sailed,” New York Tribune, 12 Mar 68, 3; “Arrival of the Sacramento,” San Francisco Times, 3 Apr 68, 1).
“Ye Equinoctial Storm,” Clemens’s poem about a night of revelry aboard the Sacramento, remained unpublished until 1884, when it appeared in the San Francisco Wasp (SLC 1884).
Transcript and paraphrase, Argus, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).
L3 , 357.
The Argus Book Shop offered the MS for sale in a 1939 letter to George Brownell. He evidently did not purchase it, although he kept the letter describing it; see Brownell Collection, pp. 581–82. The present location of the MS is not known.
The Argus letter describes the MS as “Three pages, 8vo, closely written. Office of the Express Printing Company, Buffalo, Sept. 24, 1869.”