Hon. Anson Burlingame, U. S. Minister to China, and Gen. Van Valkenburgh, Minister to Japan, with their families and suites, have just arrived here en route.  They were going to do me the honor to call on me this morning, and that accounts for my being out of bed now.  You know what condition my room is always in when you are not around—­so I climbed out of bed and dressed and shaved pretty quick and went up to the residence of the American Minister and called on them.  Mr. Burlingame told me a good deal about Hon. Jere Clemens and that Virginia Clemens who was wounded in a duel.  He was in Congress years with both of them.  Mr. B. sent for his son, to introduce him—­said he could tell that frog story of mine as well as anybody.  I told him I was glad to hear it for I never tried to tell it myself without making a botch of it.  At his request I have loaned Mr. Burlingame pretty much everything I ever wrote.  I guess he will be an almighty wise man by the time he wades through that lot.

If the New United States Minister to the Sandwich Islands (Hon. Edwin McCook,) were only here now, so that I could get his views on this new condition of Sandwich Island politics, I would sail for California at once.  But he will not arrive for two weeks yet and so I am going to spend that interval on the island of Kauai.

I stopped three days with Hon. Mr. Cony, Deputy Marshal of the Kingdom, at Hilo, Hawaii, last week and by a funny circumstance he knew everybody that I ever knew in Hannibal and Palmyra.  We used to sit up all night talking and then sleep all day.  He lives like a Prince.  Confound that Island!  I had a streak of fat and a streak of lean all over it—­got lost several times and had to sleep in huts with the natives and live like a dog.

Of course I couldn’t speak fifty words of the language.  Take it
altogether, though, it was a mighty hard trip. 
                                        Yours Affect. 
          
                                             Sam.

Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh were on their way to their posts, and their coming to the islands just at this time proved a most important circumstance to Mark Twain.  We shall come to this presently, in a summary of the newspaper letters written to the Union.  June 27th he wrote to his mother and sister a letter, only a fragment of which survives, in which he tells of the arrival in Honolulu of the survivors of the ship Hornet, burned on the line, and of his securing the first news report of the lost vessel.

Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis: