ss--I am sure
her shade will not mind. And with it I wish to print the answer which
I wrote at the time but probably did not send. If it went--which is not
likely--it went in the form of a copy, for I find the original still
here, pigeonholed with the said letter. To that kind of letters we all
write answers which we do not send, fearing to hurt where we have no
desire to hurt; I have done it many a time, and this is doubtless a case
of the sort.

THE LETTER

X------, California, JUNE 3, 1879.

Mr. S. L. Clemens, HARTFORD, CONN.:

Dear Sir,--You will doubtless be surprised to know who has presumed to
write and ask a favor of you. Let your memory go back to your days in
the Humboldt mines--'62-'63. You will remember, you and Clagett and
Oliver and the old blacksmith Tillou lived in a lean-to which was
half-way up the gulch, and there were six log cabins in the camp--strung
pretty well separated up the gulch from its mouth at the desert to where
the last claim was, at the divide. The lean-to you lived in was the one
with a canvas roof that the cow fell down through one night, as told
about by you in ROUGHING IT--my uncle Simmons remembers it very well. He
lived in the principal cabin, half-way up the divide, along with Dixon
and Parker and Smith. It had two rooms, one for kitchen and the other
for bunks, and was the only one that had. You and your party were there
on the great night, the time they had dried-apple-pie, Uncle Simmons
often speaks of it. It seems curious that dried-apple-pie should have
seemed such a great thing, but it was, and it shows how far Humboldt was
out of the world and difficult to get to, and how slim the regular bill
of fare was. Sixteen years ago--it is a long time. I was a little girl
then, only fourteen. I never saw you, I lived in Washoe. But Uncle
Simmons ran across you every now and then, all during those weeks that
you and party were there working your claim which was like the rest. The
camp played out long and long ago, there wasn't silver enough in it
to make a button. You never saw my husband, but he was there after you
left, AND LIVED IN THAT VERY LEAN-TO, a bachelor then but married to me
now. He often wishes there had been a photographer there in those days,
he would have taken the lean-to. He got hurt in the old Hal Clayton
claim that was abandoned like the others, putting in a blast and not
climbing out quick enough, though he scrambled the best he could. It
landed him c