It is all just magnificent, Joe! And no one is prouder or gladder than Yours always MARK.
At York Harbor, Maine, where they had taken a cottage for the summer--a pretty place, with Howells not far distant, at Kittery Point--Mrs. Clemens's health gave way. This was at a period when telegraphic communication was far from reliable. The old-time Western Union had fallen from grace; its "system" no longer justified the best significance of that word. The new day of reorganization was coming, and it was time for it. Mark Twain's letter concerning the service at York Harbor would hardly be warranted today, but those who remember conditions of that earlier time will agree that it was justified then, and will appreciate its satire.
To the President of The Western Union, in New York:
"THE PINES" YORK HARBOR, MAINE. DEAR SIR,--I desire to make a complaint, and I bring it to you, the head of the company, because by experience I know better than to carry it to a subordinate.
I have been here a month and a half, and by testimony of friends, reinforced by personal experience I now feel qualified to claim as an established fact that the telegraphic service here is the worst in the world except that Boston.
These services are actually slower than was the New York and Hartford service in the days when I last complained to you--which was fifteen or eighteen years ago, when telegraphic time and train time between the mentioned points was exactly the same, to-wit, three hours and a half. Six days ago--it was that raw day which provoked so much comment--my daughter was on her way up from New York, and at noon she telegraphed me from New Haven asking that I meet her with a cloak at Portsmouth. Her telegram reached me four hours and a quarter later--just 15 minutes too late for me to catch my train and meet her.
I judge that the telegram traveled about 200 miles. It is the best telegraphic work I have seen since I have been here, and I am mentioning it in this place not as a complaint but as a compliment. I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.
Still, there is a detail or two connected with this matter which ought perhaps to be mentioned. And now, having smoothed the way with the compliment, I will venture them. The head corpse in the York Harbor office sent me that telegram altho (1) he knew it would reach me too late to be of any value; (2) also, that he was going to send it to me by his boy; (3) that the boy would not take the trolley and come the 2 miles in 12 minutes, but would walk; (4) that he would be two hours and a quarter on the road; (5) and that he would collect 25 cents for transportation, for a telegram which the he knew to be worthless before he started it. From these data I infer that the Western Union owes me 75 cents; that is to say, the amount paid for combined wire and land transportation-- a recoup provided for in the printed paragraph which heads the telegraph- blank.
By these humane and Christian stages we now arrive at the complaint proper. We have had a grave case of illness in the family, and a relative was coming some six hundred miles to help in the sick-room during the convalescing period. It was an anxious time, of course, and I wrote and asked to be notified as to the hour of the expected arrival of this relative in Boston or in York Harbor. Being afraid of the telegraph--which I think ought not to be used in times of hurry and emergency--I asked that the desired message be brought to me by some swift method of transportation. By the milkman, if he was coming this way. But there are always people who think they know more than you do, especially young people; so of course the young fellow in charge of this lady used the telegraph.