Beschreibung:

CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE ("Mark Twain"). Autograph manuscript signed ("Mark Twain S.L. Clemens") of his gold-rush story "The Californian's Tale," published in the Liber Scriptorum of the Authors's Club, 1893, a working manuscript, comprising approximately 3000 words, with a few emendations and deletions by Twain in the text, dated at end "Villa Viviani, Settignano, Florence, Jan[uary 18]93." 26 pages, large 8vo, in ink on rectos and versos of 13 sheets of pale gray-green paper, each sheet neatly inlaid to a larger sheet and with hand-ruled ink border. The first page boldly titled at the top, each page neatly paginated by Twain. THE AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF MARK TWAIN'S LAST GOLD-RUSH STORY, "THE CALIFORNIAN'S TALE" A short story with vaguely supernatural overtones, set in the depopulated California gold districts in the 1870s, constituting one of Twain's last separately published California tales. The story was submitted by Clemens to an anthology of writings by members of the Authors's Club, and was published in their Liber Scriptorum in 1893. Appropriately, a prospector narrates Clemen's tale: "Twenty-three years ago I was out prospecting on the Stanilaus, tramping all day long with pick & pan & horn, & washing a hat full of dirt here & there, always expecting to make a rich strike & never doing it. It was a lovely region, woodsy, balmy, delicious & had once been populous, long years before, but now the people had vanished & the charming paradise was a solitude. They went away when the surface diggings gave out....Now & then, half an hour apart, one came across solitary log cabins of the earliest mining days, built by the first gold miners....In some few cases these cabins were still occupied....Roundabout California in those days was scattered a host of these living dead men -- pride-smitten poor fellows, grizzled & old at forty, whose secret thoughts were made all of regrets & longings -- regrets for their wasted lives, & longings to be out of the struggle & done with it all...." The narrator comes upon one such isolated cabin and is invited in by its occupant, a man "at least forty-five years old." He is struck by the beauty and the taste of the rustic cabin's furnishings, which include "wall paper, framed lithographs & bright-colored tidies & lamp-mats, & windsor chairs, & varnished what-nots with sea-shells & books and china vases on them, & the score of little unclassifiable tricks & touches that a woman's hand distributes about a home, which one see without knowing he sees them..." The lady responsible for the comfortably elegant interior is not present, but the visitor's gaze is subtly directed to her daguerrotype portrait, showing "the sweetest girlish face, & the most beautiful, as it seemed to me, that I had ever seen." When he asks the lady's whereabouts the old prospector replies serenely, "'Oh, she's away now. She's gone to see her people. They live forty or fifty miles from here. She's been gone two weeks to-day.'" She is due back in a few days, he reports, and convinces his guest to remain until her return. Another miner visits, "'to ask about the little madam, and when is she coming home. Any news from her?'" At his request the husband reads a "lovely, sedate & altogether charming" letter from his absent wife. But as Saturday--the day she is expected to return--nears, the husband's expectancy turns to agitation. Several of the old miner's friends have assembled at the cabin and decorated it for her arrival. When she does not appear at the expected time, the prospector is on the verge of panic. His friends add a powerful sedative to his whiskey and put him gently to bed. Finally they reveal the truth: his wife will never return. "'Poor thing, she's been dead nineteen years!...She went to see her folks half a year after she was married, and on her way back...the Indians captured her within five miles of this place, and she's never been heard of since.'" The miner, overcome with grief, "'never has been sane