P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not
read by it. Write, and let me know how Henry is.
It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality,
and it gives us a scale of things. Double the population of Hannibal
visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city
came a distance of thirty-eight miles! Doubtless these were amazing
statistics.
Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his
concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to
his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. He
did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion's plans were
then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a
new location. From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested
school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he
had ever seen together before. We have somehow the feeling that he had
all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was
marked by a very definite line.
The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing
establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four
dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved
them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. He lodged at a mechanics'
boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and
washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away.
He did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode
of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have
“hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to
get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. On the whole, there was
not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself
with its wonders. He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853,
and found it not easy to go. In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting
plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to
have overlooked. Among other things he says:
I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the
fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and, secondly,
because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to
leave New York every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a
liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave
I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I
shall get off Tuesday, though.
Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the
Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The
play was the “Gladiator.” I did not like parts of it much, but
other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last
act, where the “Gladiator” (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in
all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul
seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling
to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play “Damon and Pythias”
--the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia
on Monday night.
I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a “Journal”
the other day, in which I see the office has been sold....
If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about
me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is
not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a
brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take
care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid,
however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall
be) as “independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.”...
Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the
Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than
that in the summer.
“I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New
York” is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty
years later.
He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work “subbing” on a daily
paper, 'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten
thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work
done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill
he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was
still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he returned
to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled
a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand at
writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some
reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his
contributions to the Philadelphia 'Ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary
kind. Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems
unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print.
“My efforts were not received with approval,” was all he ever said of it
afterward.
There were two or three characters in the 'Inquirer' office whom he did
not forget. One of these was an old compositor who had “held a case”
in that office for many years. His name was Frog, and sometimes when he
went away the “office devils” would hang a line over his case, with a
hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of
this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been
in the beginning. Another old fellow there furnished amusement. He owned
a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of
fire. Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the
types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air:
“Doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in
the northwestern part of the city?” or “There go the fire-bells again!”
and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. It was
not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens
had his share in it.
He found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money there,
for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small
amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. In a letter to
Orion--whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October
26th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and “to serve
as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia.”
Further along he adds:
Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people
in it. There is only one thing that gets my “dander” up--and that
is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me “it's no use to
get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work
here than you can do!” “Downhearted,” the devil! I have not had a
particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four
months ago. I fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me
downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and
am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants. When I was in Hannibal, before
I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have
convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from
home.
He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its
inscription “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin,” and one is sharply reminded
of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and
Samuel Clemens. Each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his
brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly
and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman
printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human,
and of incredible popularity.
The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on
the Fairmount stage. It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a
fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing;
a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. The Wire
Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in
review. A fine residence about completed impressed him:
It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. The pillars
in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful,
ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at
the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front
windows.... To see some of them finished and standing, and
then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one,
in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise
the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble
is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia.
There is a flavor of the 'Innocents' about it; then a little further
along:
I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--“For Wissahickon and
Manayunk 25 cents.” Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and
his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I
shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon....
There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always
expected to hand up a lady's money for her. Yesterday I sat in the
front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat
opposite me. She handed me her money, which was right. But, Lord!
a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so
familiar with a stranger. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front
end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her
fare.
There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th,
to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa,
and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th.
Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a
contributor, for the latter says:
I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my
letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work
dulls one's ideas amazingly.... I believe I am the only person in
the Inquirer office that does not drink. One young fellow makes $18
for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent
of it.
How do you like “free soil”?--I would like amazingly to see a good
old-fashioned negro. My love to all.