Everything in this monster city interests me, and I cannot keep from

talking, even at the risk of being instructive. People here seem always

to express distances by parables. To a stranger it is just a little

confusing to be so parabolic--so to speak. I collar a citizen, and I

think I am going to get some valuable information out of him. I ask him

how far it is to Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and

sixpence. Now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn.

I find myself down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea

where I am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say:

"How far is it to Charing Cross?" "Shilling fare in a cab," and off he

goes. I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it, is from the

sublime to the ridiculous, he would try to express it in coin. But I am

trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and

historical reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies.

'Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it. The name

of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and

the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who

came among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and

gave him welcome and a home--Artemus Ward. Asking that you will join me,

I give you his memory.

PRINCETON

Mr. Clemens spent several days in May, 1901, in Princeton, New

Jersey, as the guest of Lawrence Hutton. He gave a reading one

evening before a large audience composed of university students

and professors. Before the reading Mr. Clemens said:

I feel exceedingly surreptitious in coming down here without an

announcement of any kind. I do not want to see any advertisements

around, for the reason that I'm not a lecturer any longer. I reformed

long ago, and I break over and commit this sin only just one time this

year: and that is moderate, I think, for a person of my disposition. It

is not my purpose to lecture any more as long as I live. I never intend

to stand up on a platform any more--unless by the request of a sheriff or

something like that.

THE ST. LOUIS HARBOR-BOAT "MARK TWAIN"

The Countess de Rochambeau christened the St. Louis harbor-boat

'Mark Twain' in honor of Mr. Clemens, June 6, 1902. Just

before the luncheon he acted as pilot.

"Lower away lead!" boomed out the voice of the pilot.

"Mark twain, quarter five and one-half-six feet!" replied the

leadsman below.

"You are all dead safe as long as I have the wheel--but this is

my last time at the wheel."

At the luncheon Mr. Clemens made a short address.

First of all, no--second of all--I wish to offer my thanks for the honor

done me by naming this last rose of summer of the Mississippi Valley for

me, this boat which represents a perished interest, which I fortified

long ago, but did not save its life. And, in the first place, I wish to

thank the Countess de Rochambeau for the honor she has done me in

presiding at this christening.

I believe that it is peculiarly appropriate that I should be allowed the

privilege of joining my voice with the general voice of St. Louis and

Missouri in welcoming to the Mississippi Valley and this part of the

continent these illustrious visitors from France.

When La Salle came down this river a century and a quarter ago there was

nothing on its banks but savages. He opened up this great river, and by

his simple act was gathered in this great Louisiana territory. I would

have done it myself for half the money.

SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY COLONEL GEORGE HARVEY AT

DELMONICO'S, DECEMBER 5, 1905, TO CELEBRATE THE SEVENTIETH

ANNIVERSARY OF MR. CLEMENS' BIRTH

Mr. Howells introduced Mr. Clemens:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, and Colonel Harvey, I will try not

to be greedy on your behalf in wishing the health of our

honored and, in view of his great age, our revered guest. I

will not say, 'Oh King, live forever!' but 'Oh King, live as

long as you like!'" [Amid great applause and waving of napkins

all rise and drink to Mark Twain.]

Well, if I made that joke, it is the best one I ever made, and it is in

the prettiest language, too.--I never can get quite to that height. But

I appreciate that joke, and I shall remember it--and I shall use it when

occasion requires.

I have had a great many birthdays in my time. I remember the first one

very well, and I always think of it with indignation; everything was so

crude, unaesthetic, primeval. Nothing like this at all. No proper

appreciative preparation made; nothing really ready. Now, for a person

born with high and delicate instincts--why, even the cradle wasn't

whitewashed--nothing ready at all. I hadn't any hair, I hadn't any

teeth, I hadn't any clothes, I had to go to my first banquet just like

that. Well, everybody came swarming in. It was the merest little bit of

a village--hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of

Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all

interested, and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was

anything fresh in my line. Why, nothing ever happened in that village

--I--why, I was the only thing that had really happened there for months

and months and months; and although I say it myself that shouldn't, I

came the nearest to being a real event that had happened in that village

in more than, two years. Well, those people came, they came with that

curiosity which is so provincial, with that frankness which also is so

provincial, and they examined me all around and gave their opinion.

Nobody asked them, and I shouldn't have minded if anybody had paid me a

compliment, but nobody did. Their opinions were all just green with

prejudice, and I feel those opinions to this day. Well, I stood that as

long as--well, you know I was born courteous, and I stood it to the

limit. I stood it an hour, and then the worm turned. I was the warm; it

was my turn to turn, and I turned. I knew very well the strength of my

position; I knew that I was the only spotlessly pure and innocent person

in that whole town, and I came out and said so: And they could not say a

word. It was so true: They blushed; they were embarrassed. Well, that

was the first after-dinner speech I ever made: I think it was after

dinner.

It's a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one.

That was my cradle-song; and this is my swan-song, I suppose. I am used

to swan-songs; I have sung them several, times.

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size

of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase,

seventieth birthday.

The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new

and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which

have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon

your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can

tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall

never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you

climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell

on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain

my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly

to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an

exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old

age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people

we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have

decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the

property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us

out of commission ahead of time. I will offer here, as a sound maxim,

this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit

suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the

hangman for seventy years. Some of the details may sound untrue, but

they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.

We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to

harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have

been regular about going to bed and getting up--and that is one of the

main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't

anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I

had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity.

It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.

In the matter of diet--which is another main thing--I have been

persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me

until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the

best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie

after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For

thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and

no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That

is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a

headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy

comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I

wish to urge upon you this--which I think is wisdom--that if you find you

can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When

they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on

your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station

where there's a cemetery.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.

I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when

I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and

that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was

a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an

example to others, and--not that I care for moderation myself, it has

always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when

awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite

well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be

seventy.

I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night,

sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste

any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and

precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should

lose the only moral you've got--meaning the chairman--if you've got one:

I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking

now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it

was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a

slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have

never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that

those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars

--reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four

dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven,

now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes

the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people

that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is?

As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I

like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. This

dryness does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are

different. You let it alone.

Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and

have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on

allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did;

it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made

cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine

barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The

rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such

things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust.

I had it all. By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was

established, and there has never been much the matter with me since.

But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start

for seventy on that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me,

but that was merely an accident; it couldn't happen again in a century.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never

intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit

when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try

my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to repeat and

emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's road. My

habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.

I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other

people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed:

you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get

them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your

box. Morals are an acquirement--like music, like a foreign language,

like piety, poker, paralysis--no man is born with them. I wasn't myself,

I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this

house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that--the

world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral.

I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape,

the weather, the--I can remember how everything looked. It was an old

moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit,

anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a

dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's

Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat

of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she

will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive.

When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she

hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all.

Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and

served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she

got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and

character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for

business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her

--ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was--I sold her to Leopold, the pirate

King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very

glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16

feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They

believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.

Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin

microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes is

morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian--I mean, you take the

sterilized Christian, for there's only one. Dear sir, I wish you

wouldn't look at me like that.

Threescore years and ten!

It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no

active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a

time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your

term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an

honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not

for you, nor any bugle-tail but "lights out." You pay the time-worn duty

bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for

they are not legally collectable.

The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many

tinges, you cam lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will

never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and

the late home-coming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter

through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you

now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping, and you

must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you

that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink

at thought of these things, you need only reply, "Your invitation honors

me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I

am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my

pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all

affection; and that when you in your return shall arrive at pier No.70

you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay

your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS COMPLETE

ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1853-1866

VOLUME I

FOREWORD

Nowhere is the human being more truly revealed than in his letters.

Not in literary letters--prepared with care, and the thought of possible

publication--but in those letters wrought out of the press of

circumstances, and with no idea of print in mind. A collection of such

documents, written by one whose life has become of interest to mankind at

large, has a value quite aside from literature, in that it reflects in

some degree at least the soul of the writer.

The letters of Mark Twain are peculiarly of the revealing sort. He was a

man of few restraints and of no affectations. In his correspondence,

as in his talk, he spoke what was in his mind, untrammeled by literary

conventions.

Necessarily such a collection does not constitute a detailed life story,

but is supplementary to it. An extended biography of Mark Twain has

already been published. His letters are here gathered for those who wish

to pursue the subject somewhat more exhaustively from the strictly

personal side. Selections from this correspondence were used in the

biography mentioned. Most of these are here reprinted in the belief that

an owner of the "Letters" will wish the collection to be reasonably

complete.

[Etext Editor's Note: A. B. Paine considers this compendium a supplement

to his "Mark Twain, A Biography", I have arranged the volumes of the

"Letters" to correspond as closely as possible with the dates of the

Project Gutenberg six volumes of the "Biography". D.W.]

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS

MARK TWAIN--A BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, for nearly half a century known and celebrated

as "Mark Twain," was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835.

He was one of the foremost American philosophers of his day; he was the

world's most famous humorist of any day. During the later years of his

life he ranked not only as America's chief man of letters, but likewise

as her best known and best loved citizen.

The beginnings of that life were sufficiently unpromising. The family

was a good one, of old Virginia and Kentucky stock, but its circumstances

were reduced, its environment meager and disheartening. The father, John

Marshall Clemens--a lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation--had

brought his household to Florida from Jamestown, Tennessee, somewhat

after the manner of judge Hawkins as pictured in The Gilded Age. Florida

was a small town then, a mere village of twenty-one houses located on

Salt River, but judge Clemens, as he was usually called, optimistic and

speculative in his temperament, believed in its future. Salt River would

be made navigable; Florida would become a metropolis. He established a

small business there, and located his family in the humble frame cottage

where, five months later, was born a baby boy to whom they gave the name

of Samuel--a family name--and added Langhorne, after an old Virginia

friend of his father.

The child was puny, and did not make a very sturdy fight for life.

Still he weathered along, season after season, and survived two stronger

children, Margaret and Benjamin. By 1839 Judge Clemens had lost faith in

Florida. He removed his family to Hannibal, and in this Mississippi

River town the little lad whom the world was to know as Mark Twain spent

his early life. In Tom Sawyer we have a picture of the Hannibal of those

days and the atmosphere of his boyhood there.

His schooling was brief and of a desultory kind. It ended one day in

1847, when his father died and it became necessary that each one should

help somewhat in the domestic crisis. His brother Orion, ten years his

senior, was already a printer by trade. Pamela, his sister; also

considerably older, had acquired music, and now took a few pupils.

The little boy Sam, at twelve, was apprenticed to a printer named Ament.

His wages consisted of his board and clothes--"more board than clothes,"

as he once remarked to the writer.

He remained with Ament until his brother Orion bought out a small paper

in Hannibal in 1850. The paper, in time, was moved into a part of the

Clemens home, and the two brothers ran it, the younger setting most of

the type. A still younger brother, Henry, entered the office as an

apprentice. The Hannibal journal was no great paper from the beginning,

and it did not improve with time. Still, it managed to survive--country

papers nearly always manage to survive--year after year, bringing in some

sort of return. It was on this paper that young Sam Clemens began his

writings--burlesque, as a rule, of local characters and conditions

--usually published in his brother's absence; generally resulting in

trouble on his return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had

but realized his brother's talent he might have turned it into capital

even then.

In 1853 (he was not yet eighteen) Sam Clemens grew tired of his

limitations and pined for the wider horizon of the world. He gave out to

his family that he was going to St. Louis, but he kept on to New York,

where a World's Fair was then going on. In New York he found employment

at his trade, and during the hot months of 1853 worked in a

printing-office in Cliff Street. By and by he went to Philadelphia,

where he worked a brief time; made a trip to Washington, and presently

set out for the West again, after an absence of more than a year.

Onion, meanwhile, had established himself at Muscatine, Iowa, but soon

after removed to Keokuk, where the brothers were once more together,

till following their trade. Young Sam Clemens remained in Keokuk until

the winter of 1856-57, when he caught a touch of the South-American fever

then prevalent; and decided to go to Brazil. He left Keokuk for

Cincinnati, worked that winter in a printing-office there, and in April

took the little steamer, Paul Jones, for New Orleans, where he expected

to find a South-American vessel. In Life on the Mississippi we have his

story of how he met Horace Bixby and decided to become a pilot instead of

a South American adventurer--jauntily setting himself the stupendous task

of learning the twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi River between St.

Louis and New Orleans--of knowing it as exactly and as unfailingly, even

in the dark, as one knows the way to his own features. It seems

incredible to those who knew Mark Twain in his later years--dreamy,

unpractical, and indifferent to details--that he could have acquired so

vast a store of minute facts as were required by that task. Yet within

eighteen months he had become not only a pilot, but one of the best and

most careful pilots on the river, intrusted with some of the largest and

most valuable steamers. He continued in that profession for two and a

half years longer, and during that time met with no disaster that cost

his owners a single dollar for damage.

Then the war broke out. South Carolina seceded in December, 1860 and

other States followed. Clemens was in New Orleans in January, 1861, when

Louisiana seceded, and his boat was put into the Confederate service and

sent up the Red River. His occupation gone, he took steamer for the

North--the last one before the blockade closed. A blank cartridge was

fired at them from Jefferson Barracks when they reached St. Louis, but

they did not understand the signal, and kept on. Presently a shell

carried away part of the pilot-house and considerably disturbed its

inmates. They realized, then, that war had really begun.

In those days Clemens's sympathies were with the South. He hurried up to

Hannibal and enlisted with a company of young fellows who were recruiting

with the avowed purpose of "throwing off the yoke of the invader." They

were ready for the field, presently, and set out in good order, a sort of

nondescript cavalry detachment, mounted on animals more picturesque than

beautiful. Still, it was a resolute band, and might have done very well,

only it rained a good deal, which made soldiering disagreeable and hard.

Lieutenant Clemens resigned at the end of two weeks, and decided to go to

Nevada with Orion, who was a Union abolitionist and had received an

appointment from Lincoln as Secretary of the new Territory.

In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain gives us the story of the overland journey

made by the two brothers, and a picture of experiences at the other end

--true in aspect, even if here and there elaborated in detail. He was

Orion's private secretary, but there was no private-secretary work to do,

and no salary attached to the position. The incumbent presently went to

mining, adding that to his other trades.

He became a professional miner, but not a rich one. He was at Aurora,

California, in the Esmeralda district, skimping along, with not much to

eat and less to wear, when he was summoned by Joe Goodman, owner and

editor of the Virginia City Enterprise, to come up and take the local

editorship of that paper. He had been contributing sketches to it now

and then, under the pen, name of "Josh," and Goodman, a man of fine

literary instincts, recognized a talent full of possibilities. This was

in the late summer of 1862. Clemens walked one hundred and thirty miles

over very bad roads to take the job, and arrived way-worn and

travel-stained. He began on a salary of twenty-five dollars a week,

picking up news items here and there, and contributing occasional

sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, and the like. When the Legislature

convened at Carson City he was sent down to report it, and then, for the

first time, began signing his articles "Mark Twain," a river term, used

in making soundings, recalled from his piloting days. The name presently

became known up and down the Pacific coast. His articles were, copied

and commented upon. He was recognized as one of the foremost among a

little coterie of overland writers, two of whom, Mark Twain and Bret

Harte, were soon to acquire a world-wide fame.

He left Carson City one day, after becoming involved in a duel, the

result of an editorial squib written in Goodman's absence, and went

across the Sierras to San Francisco. The duel turned out farcically

enough, but the Nevada law, which regarded even a challenge or its

acceptance as a felony, was an inducement to his departure. Furthermore,

he had already aspired to a wider field of literary effort. He attached

himself to the Morning Call, and wrote occasionally for one or two

literary papers--the Golden Era and the Californian---prospering well

enough during the better part of the year. Bret Harte and the rest of

the little Pacific-slope group were also on the staff of these papers,

and for a time, at least, the new school of American humor mustered in

San Francisco.

The connection with the Call was not congenial. In due course it came to

a natural end, and Mark Twain arranged to do a daily San Francisco letter

for his old paper, the Enterprise. The Enterprise letters stirred up

trouble. They criticized the police of San Francisco so severely that

the officials found means of making the writer's life there difficult and

comfortless. With Jim Gillis, brother of a printer of whom he was fond,

and who had been the indirect cause of his troubles, he went up into

Calaveras County, to a cabin on jackass Hill. Jim Gillis, a lovable,

picturesque character (the Truthful James of Bret Harte), owned mining

claims. Mark Twain decided to spend his vacation in pocket-mining, and

soon added that science to his store of knowledge. It was a halcyon,

happy three months that he lingered there, but did not make his fortune;

he only laid the corner-stone.

They tried their fortune at Angel's Camp, a place well known to readers

of Bret Harte. But it rained pretty steadily, and they put in most of

their time huddled around the single stove of the dingy hotel of Angel's,

telling yarns. Among the stories was one told by a dreary narrator named

Ben Coon. It was about a frog that had been trained to jump, but failed

to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously

loaded him with shot. The story had been circulated among the camps, but

Mark Twain had never heard it until then. The tale and the tiresome

fashion of its telling amused him. He made notes to remember it.

Their stay in Angel's Camp came presently to an end. One day, when the

mining partners were following the specks of gold that led to a pocket

somewhere up the hill, a chill, dreary rain set in. Jim, as usual was

washing, and Clemens was carrying water. The "color" became better and

better as they ascended, and Gillis, possessed with the mining passion,

would have gone on, regardless of the rain. Clemens, however, protested,

and declared that each pail of water was his last. Finally he said, in

his deliberate drawl:

"Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable.

Let's go to the house and wait till it clears up."

Gillis had just taken out a pan of earth. "Bring one more pail, Sam," he

pleaded.

"I won't do it, Jim! Not a drop! Not if I knew there was a million

dollars in that pan!"

They left the pan standing there and went back to Angel's Camp. The rain

continued and they returned to jackass Hill without visiting their claim

again. Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth

left standing on the slope above Angel's, and exposed a handful of

nuggets-pure gold. Two strangers came along and, observing it, had sat

down to wait until the thirty-day claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis

should expire. They did not mind the rain--not with that gold in sight

--and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few

pans further, and took out-some say ten, some say twenty, thousand

dollars. It was a good pocket. Mark Twain missed it by one pail of

water. Still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers The

Jumping Frog.

Matters having quieted down in San Francisco, he returned and took up his

work again. Artemus Ward, whom he had met in Virginia City, wrote him

for something to use in his (Ward's) new book. Clemens sent the frog

story, but he had been dilatory in preparing it, and when it reached New

York, Carleton, the publisher, had Ward's book about ready for the press.

It did not seem worth while to Carleton to include the frog story, and

handed it over to Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press--a perishing

sheet-saying:

"Here, Clapp, here's something you can use."

The story appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865. According

to the accounts of that time it set all New York in a roar, which

annoyed, rather than gratified, its author. He had thought very little

of it, indeed, yet had been wondering why some of his more highly

regarded work had not found fuller recognition.

But The Jumping Frog did not die. Papers printed it and reprinted it,

and it was translated into foreign tongues. The name of "Mark Twain"

became known as the author of that sketch, and the two were permanently

associated from the day of its publication.

Such fame as it brought did not yield heavy financial return. Its author

continued to win a more or less precarious livelihood doing miscellaneous

work, until March, 1866, when he was employed by the Sacramento Union to

contribute a series of letters from the Sandwich Islands. They were

notable letters, widely read and freely copied, and the sojourn there was

a generally fortunate one. It was during his stay in the islands that

the survivors of the wrecked vessel, the Hornet, came in, after long

privation at sea. Clemens was sick at the time, but Anson Burlingame,

who was in Honolulu, on the way to China, had him carried in a cot to the

hospital, where he could interview the surviving sailors and take down

their story. It proved a great "beat" for the Union, and added

considerably to its author's prestige. On his return to San Francisco he

contributed an article on the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, and

looked forward to its publication as a beginning of a real career. But,

alas! when it appeared the printer and the proof-reader had somehow

converted "Mark Twain" into "Mark Swain," and his dreams perished.

Undecided as to his plans, he was one day advised by a friend to deliver

a lecture. He was already known as an entertaining talker, and his

adviser judged his possibilities well. In Roughing It we find the story

of that first lecture and its success. He followed it with other

lectures up and down the Coast. He had added one more profession to his

intellectual stock in trade.

Mark Twain, now provided with money, decided to pay a visit to his

people. He set out for the East in December, 1866, via Panama, arriving

in New York in January. A few days later he was with his mother, then

living with his sister, in St. Louis. A little later he lectured in

Keokuk, and in Hannibal, his old home.

It was about this time that the first great Mediterranean steamship

excursion began to be exploited. No such ocean picnic had ever been

planned before, and it created a good deal of interest East and West.

Mark Twain heard of it and wanted to go. He wrote to friends on the

'Alta California,' of San Francisco, and the publishers of that paper had

sufficient faith to advance the money for his passage, on the

understanding that he was to contribute frequent letters, at twenty

dollars apiece. It was a liberal offer, as rates went in those days, and

a godsend in the fullest sense of the word to Mark Twain.

Clemens now hurried to New York in order to be there in good season for

the sailing date, which was in June. In New York he met Frank Fuller,

whom he had known as territorial Governor of Utah, an energetic and

enthusiastic admirer of the Western humorist. Fuller immediately

proposed that Clemens give a lecture in order to establish his reputation

on the Atlantic coast. Clemens demurred, but Fuller insisted, and

engaged Cooper Union for the occasion. Not many tickets were sold.

Fuller, however, always ready for an emergency, sent out a flood of

complimentaries to the school-teachers of New York and adjacent

territory, and the house was crammed. It turned out to be a notable

event. Mark Twain was at his best that night; the audience laughed

until, as some of them declared when the lecture was over, they were too

weak to leave their seats. His success as a lecturer was assured.

The Quaker City was the steamer selected for the great oriental tour.

It sailed as advertised, June 8, 1867, and was absent five months, during

which Mark Twain contributed regularly to the 'Alta-California', and

wrote several letters for the New York Tribune. They were read and

copied everywhere. They preached a new gospel in travel literature

--a gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity

in according praise to whatever he considered genuine, and ridicule to

the things believed to be shams. It was a gospel that Mark Twain

continued to preach during his whole career. It became, in fact, his

chief literary message to the world, a world ready for that message.

He returned to find himself famous. Publishers were ready with plans for

collecting the letters in book form. The American Publishing Company,

of Hartford, proposed a volume, elaborately illustrated, to be sold by

subscription. He agreed with them as to terms, and went to Washington'

to prepare copy. But he could not work quietly there, and presently was

back in San Francisco, putting his book together, lecturing occasionally,

always to crowded houses. He returned in August, 1868, with the

manuscript of the Innocents Abroad, and that winter, while his book was

being manufactured, lectured throughout the East and Middle West, making

his headquarters in Hartford, and in Elmira, New York.

He had an especial reason for going to Elmira. On the Quaker City he had

met a young man by the name of Charles Langdon, and one day, in the Bay

of Smyrna, had seen a miniature of the boy's sister, Olivia Langdon, then

a girl of about twenty-two. He fell in love with that picture, and still

more deeply in love with the original when he met her in New York on his

return. The Langdon home was in Elmira, and it was for this reason that

as time passed he frequently sojourned there. When the proofs of the

Innocents Abroad were sent him he took them along, and he and sweet

"Livy" Langdon read them together. What he lacked in those days in

literary delicacy she detected, and together they pruned it away. She

became his editor that winter--a position which she held until her death.

The book was published in July, 1869, and its success was immediate and

abundant. On his wedding-day, February 2, 1870, Clemens received a check

from his publishers for more than four thousand dollars, royalty

accumulated during the three months preceding. The sales soon amounted

to more than fifty thousand copies, and had increased to very nearly one

hundred thousand at the end of the first three years. It was a book of

travel, its lowest price three dollars and fifty cents. Even with our

increased reading population no such sale is found for a book of that

description to-day. And the Innocents Abroad holds its place--still

outsells every other book in its particular field. [This in 1917. D.W.]

Mark Twain now decided to settle down. He had bought an interest in the

Express, of Buffalo, New York, and took up his residence in that city in

a house presented to the young couple by Mr. Langdon. It did not prove a

fortunate beginning. Sickness, death, and trouble of many kinds put a

blight on the happiness of their first married year and gave, them a

distaste for the home in which they had made such a promising start.

A baby boy, Langdon Clemens, came along in November, but he was never a

strong child. By the end of the following year the Clemenses had

arranged for a residence in Hartford, temporary at first, later made

permanent. It was in Hartford that little Langdon died, in 1872.

Clemens, meanwhile, had sold out his interest in the Express, severed his

connection with the Galaxy, a magazine for which he was doing a

department each month, and had written a second book for the American

Publishing Company, Roughing It, published in 1872. In August of the

same year he made a trip to London, to get material for a book on

England, but was too much sought after, too continuously feted, to do any

work. He went alone, but in November returned with the purpose of taking

Mrs. Clemens and the new baby, Susy, to England the following spring.

They sailed in April, 1873, and spent a good portion of the year in

England and Scotland. They returned to America in November, and Clemens

hurried back to London alone to deliver a notable series of lectures

under the management of George Dolby, formerly managing agent for Charles

Dickens. For two months Mark Twain lectured steadily to London

audiences--the big Hanover Square rooms always filled. He returned to

his family in January, 1874.

Meantime, a home was being built for them in Hartford, and in the autumn

of 1874 they took up residence in ita happy residence, continued through

seventeen years--well-nigh perfect years. Their summers they spent in

Elmira, on Quarry Farm--a beautiful hilltop, the home of Mrs. Clemens's

sister. It was in Elmira that much of Mark Twain's literary work was

done. He had a special study there, some distance from the house, where

he loved to work out his fancies and put them into visible form.

It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on.

The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk,

near and far, and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort.

Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston and

New York, and every foreign notable who visited America made a pilgrimage

to Hartford to see Mark Twain. Some even went as far as Elmira, among

them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a chapter of his American

Notes. Kipling declared he had come all the way from India to see Mark

Twain.

Hartford had its own literary group. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived

near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner. The Clemens and

Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age, published

in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark Twain. The

character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become immortal, and it is

a character that only Mark Twain could create, for, though drawn from his

mother's cousin, James Lampton, it embodies--and in no very exaggerated

degree--characteristics that were his own. The tendency to make millions

was always imminent; temptation was always hard to resist. Money-making

schemes are continually being placed before men of means and prominence,

and Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes fatally

attractive.

It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in

a typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars

and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by. It was because of this

characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser

importance, but no less disastrous in the end. His one successful

commercial venture was his association with Charles L. Webster in the

publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to pay

a royalty of more than four hundred thousand dollars to Grant's widow

--the largest royalty ever paid from any single publication. It saved

the Grant family from poverty. Yet even this triumph was a misfortune

to Mark Twain, for it led to scores of less profitable book ventures and

eventual disaster.

Meanwhile he had written and published a number of books. Tom Sawyer,

The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court were among the volumes that

had entertained the world and inspired it with admiration and love for

their author. In 1878-79 he had taken his family to Europe, where they

spent their time in traveling over the Continent. It was during this

period that he was joined by his intimate friend, the Rev. Joseph H.

Twichell, of Hartford, and the two made a journey, the story of which is

told in A Tramp Abroad.

In 1891 the Hartford house was again closed, this time indefinitely,

and the family, now five in number, took up residence in Berlin. The

typesetting-machine and the unfortunate publishing venture were drawing

heavily on the family finances at this period, and the cost of the

Hartford establishment was too great to be maintained. During the next

three years he was distracted by the financial struggle which ended in

April, 1894, with the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co. Mark Twain now

found himself bankrupt, and nearly one hundred thousand dollars in debt.

It had been a losing fight, with this bitter ending always in view;

yet during this period of hard, hopeless effort he had written a large

portion of the book which of all his works will perhaps survive the

longest--his tender and beautiful story of Joan of Arc. All his life

Joan had been his favorite character in the world's history, and during

those trying months and years of the early nineties--in Berlin, in

Florence, in Paris--he was conceiving and putting his picture of that

gentle girl-warrior into perfect literary form. It was published in

Harper's Magazine--anonymously, because, as he said, it would not have

been received seriously had it appeared over his own name. The

authorship was presently recognized. Exquisitely, reverently, as the

story was told, it had in it the, touch of quaint and gentle humor which

could only have been given to it by Mark Twain.

It was only now and then that Mark Twain lectured during these years.

He had made a reading tour with George W. Cable during the winter of

1884-85, but he abominated the platform, and often vowed he would never

appear before an audience again. Yet, in 1895, when he was sixty years

old, he decided to rebuild his fortunes by making a reading tour around

the world. It was not required of him to pay his debts in full. The

creditors were willing to accept fifty per cent. of the liabilities, and

had agreed to a settlement on that basis. But this did not satisfy Mrs.

Clemens, and it did not satisfy him. They decided to pay dollar for

dollar. They sailed for America, and in July, 1895, set out from Elmira

on the long trail across land and sea. Mrs. Clemens, and Clara Clemens,

joined this pilgrimage, Susy and Jean Clemens remaining at Elmira with

their aunt. Looking out of the car windows, the travelers saw Susy

waving them an adieu. It was a picture they would long remember.

The reading tour was one of triumph. High prices and crowded houses

prevailed everywhere. The author-reader visited Australia, New Zealand,

India, Ceylon, South Africa, arriving in England, at last, with the money

and material which would pay off the heavy burden of debt and make him

once more free before the world. And in that hour of triumph came the

heavy blow. Susy Clemens, never very strong, had been struck down. The

first cable announced her illness. The mother and Clara sailed at once.

Before they were half-way across the ocean a second cable announced that

Susy was dead. The father had to meet and endure the heartbreak alone;

he could not reach America, in time for the burial. He remained in

England, and was joined there by the sorrowing family.

They passed that winter in London, where he worked at the story of his

travels, Following the Equator, the proofs of which he read the next

summer in Switzerland. The returns from it, and from his reading

venture, wiped away Mark Twain's indebtedness and made him free. He

could go back to America; as he said, able to look any man in the face

again.

Yet he did not go immediately. He could live more economically abroad,

and economy was still necessary. The family spent two winters in Vienna,

and their apartments there constituted a veritable court where the

world's notables gathered. Another winter in England followed, and then,

in the latter part of 1900, they went home--that is, to America. Mrs.

Clemens never could bring herself to return to Hartford, and never saw

their home there again.

Mark Twain's return to America, was in the nature of a national event.

Wherever he appeared throngs turned out to bid him welcome. Mighty

banquets were planned in his honor.

In a house at 14 West Tenth Street, and in a beautiful place at

Riverdale, on the Hudson, most of the next three years were passed. Then

Mrs. Clemens's health failed, and in the autumn of 1903 the family went

to Florence for her benefit. There, on the 5th of June, 1904, she died.

They brought her back and laid her beside Susy, at Elmira. That winter

the family took up residence at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York, and remained

there until the completion of Stormfield, at Redding, Connecticut, in

1908.

In his later life Mark Twain was accorded high academic honors. Already,

in 1888, he had received from Yale College the degree of Master of Arts,

and the same college made him a Doctor of Literature in 1901. A year

later the university of his own State, at Columbia, Missouri, conferred

the same degree, and then, in 1907, came the crowning honor, when

venerable Oxford tendered him the doctor's robe.

"I don't know why they should give me a degree like that," he said,

quaintly. "I never doctored any literature--I wouldn't know how."

He had thought never to cross the ocean again, but he declared he would

travel to Mars and back, if necessary, to get that Oxford degree.

He appreciated its full meaning-recognition by the world's foremost

institution of learning of the achievements of one who had no learning of

the institutionary kind. He sailed in June, and his sojourn in England

was marked by a continuous ovation. His hotel was besieged by callers.

Two secretaries were busy nearly twenty hours a day attending to visitors

and mail. When he appeared on the street his name went echoing in every

direction and the multitudes gathered. On the day when he rose, in his

scarlet robe and black mortar-board, to receive his degree (he must have

made a splendid picture in that dress, with his crown of silver hair),

the vast assembly went wild. What a triumph, indeed, for the little

Missouri printer-boy! It was the climax of a great career.

Mark Twain's work was always of a kind to make people talk, always

important, even when it was mere humor. Yet it was seldom that; there

was always wisdom under it, and purpose, and these things gave it dynamic

force and enduring life. Some of his aphorisms--so quaint in form as to

invite laughter--are yet fairly startling in their purport. His

paraphrase, "When in doubt, tell the truth," is of this sort. "Frankness

is a jewel; only the young can afford it," he once said to the writer,

apropos of a little girl's remark. His daily speech was full of such

things. The secret of his great charm was his great humanity and the

gentle quaintness and sincerity of his utterance.

His work did not cease when the pressing need of money came to an end.

He was full of ideas, and likely to begin a new article or story at any

time. He wrote and published a number of notable sketches, articles,

stories, even books, during these later years, among them that marvelous

short story--"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." In that story, as in

most of his later work, he proved to the world that he was much more than

a humorist--that he was, in fact, a great teacher, moralist, philosopher

--the greatest, perhaps, of his age.

His life at Stormfield--he had never seen the place until the day of his

arrival, June 18, 1908--was a peaceful and serene old age. Not that he

was really old; he never was that. His step, his manner, his point of

view, were all and always young. He was fond of children and frequently

had them about him. He delighted in games--especially in billiards--and

in building the house at Stormfield the billiard-room was first

considered. He had a genuine passion for the sport; without it his

afternoon was not complete. His mornings he was likely to pass in bed,

smoking--he was always smoking--and attending to his correspondence and

reading. History and the sciences interested him, and his bed was strewn

with biographies and stories of astronomical and geological research.

The vastness of distances and periods always impressed him. He had no

head for figures, but he would labor for hours over scientific

calculations, trying to compass them and to grasp their gigantic import.

I remember once finding him highly elated over the fact that he had

figured out for himself the length in hours and minutes of a "light

year." He showed me the pages covered with figures, and was more proud of

them than if they had been the pages of an immortal story. Then we

played billiards, but even his favorite game could not make him

altogether forget his splendid achievement.

It was on the day before Christmas, 1909, that heavy bereavement once

more came into the life of Mark Twain. His daughter Jean, long subject

to epileptic attacks, was seized with a convulsion while in her bath and

died before assistance reached her. He was dazed by the suddenness of

the blow. His philosophy sustained him. He was glad, deeply glad for

the beautiful girl that had been released.

"I never greatly envied anybody but the dead," he said, when he had

looked at her. "I always envy the dead."

The coveted estate of silence, time's only absolute gift, it was the one

benefaction he had ever considered worth while.

Yet the years were not unkindly to Mark Twain. They brought him sorrow,

but they brought him likewise the capacity and opportunity for large

enjoyment, and at the last they laid upon him a kind of benediction.

Naturally impatient, he grew always more gentle, more generous, more

tractable and considerate as the seasons passed. His final days may be

said to have been spent in the tranquil light of a summer afternoon.

His own end followed by a few months that of his daughter. There were

already indications that his heart was seriously affected, and soon after

Jean's death he sought the warm climate of Bermuda. But his malady made

rapid progress, and in April he returned to Stormfield. He died there

just a week later, April 21, 1910.

Any attempt to designate Mark Twain's place in the world's literary

history would be presumptuous now. Yet I cannot help thinking that he

will maintain his supremacy in the century that produced him. I think so

because, of all the writers of that hundred years, his work was the most

human his utterances went most surely to the mark. In the long analysis

of the ages it is the truth that counts, and he never approximated, never

compromised, but pronounced those absolute verities to which every human

being of whatever rank must instantly respond.

His understanding of subjective human nature--the vast, unwritten life

within--was simply amazing. Such knowledge he acquired at the

fountainhead--that is, from himself. He recognized in himself an extreme

example of the human being with all the attributes of power and of

weakness, and he made his exposition complete.

The world will long miss Mark Twain; his example and his teaching will be

neither ignored nor forgotten. Genius defies the laws of perspective and

looms larger as it recedes. The memory of Mark Twain remains to us a

living and intimate presence that today, even more than in life,

constitutes a stately moral bulwark reared against hypocrisy and

superstition--a mighty national menace to sham.

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS

I

EARLY LETTERS, 1853. NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA

We have no record of Mark Twain's earliest letters. Very likely

they were soiled pencil notes, written to some school sweetheart

--to "Becky Thatcher," perhaps--and tossed across at lucky moments,

or otherwise, with happy or disastrous results. One of those

smudgy, much-folded school notes of the Tom Sawyer period would be

priceless to-day, and somewhere among forgotten keepsakes it may

exist, but we shall not be likely to find it. No letter of his

boyhood, no scrap of his earlier writing, has come to light except

his penciled name, SAM CLEMENS, laboriously inscribed on the inside

of a small worn purse that once held his meager, almost non-existent

wealth. He became a printer's apprentice at twelve, but as he

received no salary, the need of a purse could not have been urgent.

He must have carried it pretty steadily, however, from its

appearance--as a kind of symbol of hope, maybe--a token of that

Sellers-optimism which dominated his early life, and was never

entirely subdued.

No other writing of any kind has been preserved from Sam Clemens's

boyhood, none from that period of his youth when he had served his

apprenticeship and was a capable printer on his brother's paper, a

contributor to it when occasion served. Letters and manuscripts of

those days have vanished--even his contributions in printed form are

unobtainable. It is not believed that a single number of Orion

Clemens's paper, the Hannibal Journal, exists to-day.

It was not until he was seventeen years old that Sam Clemens wrote a

letter any portion of which has survived. He was no longer in

Hannibal. Orion's unprosperous enterprise did not satisfy him.

His wish to earn money and to see the world had carried him first to

St. Louis, where his sister Pamela was living, then to New York

City, where a World's Fair in a Crystal Palace was in progress.

The letter tells of a visit to this great exhibition. It is not

complete, and the fragment bears no date, but it was written during

the summer of 1853.

Fragment of a letter from Sam L. Clemens to his sister

Pamela Moffett, in St. Louis, summer of 1853:

. . . From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the

flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering

jewelry, gaudy tapestry, &c., with the busy crowd passing to and fro--tis

a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description.

The Machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot enumerate any

of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 8 o'clock.) It would

take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and as I was

only in a little over two hours tonight, I only glanced at about

one-third of the articles; and having a poor memory; I have enumerated

scarcely any of even the principal objects. The visitors to the Palace

average 6,000 daily--double the population of Hannibal. The price of

admission being 50 cents, they take in about $3,000.

The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace--from

it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country round. The

Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder

yet. Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the Hudson River, and

pass through the country to Westchester county, where a whole river is

turned from its course, and brought to New York. From the reservoir in

the city to the Westchester county reservoir, the distance is

thirty-eight miles! and if necessary, they could supply every family

in New York with one hundred barrels of water per day!

I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go to the

country and take exercise; for he is not half so healthy as Ma thinks he

is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. Four

times every day I walk a little over one mile; and working hard all day,

and walking four miles, is exercise--I am used to it, now, though, and it

is no trouble. Where is it Orion's going to? Tell Ma my promises are

faithfully kept, and if I have my health I will take her to Ky. in the

spring--I shall save money for this. Tell Jim and all the rest of them

to write, and give me all the news. I am sorry to hear such bad news

from Will and Captain Bowen. I shall write to Will soon. The

Chatham-square Post Office and the Broadway office too, are out of my

way, and I always go to the General Post Office; so you must write the

direction of my letters plain, "New York City, N. Y.," without giving the

street or anything of the kind, or they may go to some of the other

offices. (It has just struck 2 A.M. and I always get up at 6, and am

at work at 7.) You ask me where I spend my evenings. Where would you

suppose, with a free printers' library containing more than 4,000 volumes

within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to? I shall

write to Ella soon. Write soon

Truly your Brother

SAM.

P. S. I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not

read by it.

He was lodging in a mechanics' cheap boarding-house in Duane Street,

and we may imagine the bareness of his room, the feeble poverty of

his lamp.

"Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept." It was the day when he

had left Hannibal. His mother, Jane Clemens, a resolute, wiry woman

of forty-nine, had put together his few belongings. Then, holding

up a little Testament:

"I want you to take hold of the end of this, Sam," she said, "and

make me a promise. I want you to repeat after me these words:

'I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card, or drink a drop

of liquor while I am gone.'"

It was this oath, repeated after her, that he was keeping

faithfully. The Will Bowen mentioned is a former playmate, one of

Tom Sawyer's outlaw band. He had gone on the river to learn

piloting with an elder brother, the "Captain." What the bad news

was is no longer remembered, but it could not have been very

serious, for the Bowen boys remained on the river for many years.

"Ella" was Samuel Clemens's cousin and one-time sweetheart, Ella

Creel. "Jim" was Jim Wolfe, an apprentice in Orion's office, and

the hero of an adventure which long after Mark Twain wrote under the

title of, "Jim Wolfe and the Cats."

There is scarcely a hint of the future Mark Twain in this early

letter. It is the letter of a boy of seventeen who is beginning to

take himself rather seriously--who, finding himself for the first

time far from home and equal to his own responsibilities, is willing

to carry the responsibility of others. Henry, his brother, three

years younger, had been left in the printing-office with Orion, who,

after a long, profitless fight, is planning to remove from Hannibal.

The young traveler is concerned as to the family outlook, and will

furnish advice if invited. He feels the approach of prosperity, and

will take his mother on a long-coveted trip to her old home in the

spring. His evenings? Where should he spend them, with a free

library of four thousand volumes close by? It is distinctly a

youthful letter, a bit pretentious, and wanting in the spontaneity

and humor of a later time. It invites comment, now, chiefly because

it is the first surviving document in the long human story.

He was working in the printing-office of John A. Gray and Green, on

Cliff Street, and remained there through the summer. He must have

written more than once during this period, but the next existing

letter--also to Sister Pamela--was written in October. It is

perhaps a shade more natural in tone than the earlier example, and

there is a hint of Mark Twain in the first paragraph.

To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

NEW YORK . . . , Oct. Saturday '53.

MY DEAR SISTER,--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. It is as hard on my

conscience to leave New York, as it was easy to leave Hannibal. I think

I shall get off Tuesday, though.

Edwin Forrest has been playing, for the last sixteen days, at the

Broadway Theatre, 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 his 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. I suppose Ma, Orion

and Henry are in St. Louis now. If Orion has no other project in his

head, he ought to take the contract for getting out some weekly paper, if

he cannot get a foremanship. Now, for such a paper as the "Presbyterian"

(containing about 60,000,--[Sixty thousand ems, type measurement.])

he could get $20 or $25 per week, and he and Henry could easily do the

work; nothing to do but set the type and make up the forms....

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 from no one, and endeavor to be (and shall be) as "independent as

a wood-sawyer's clerk."

I never saw such a place for military companies as New York. Go on the

street when you will, you are sure to meet a company in full uniform,

with all the usual appendages of drums, fifes, &c. I saw a large company

of soldiers of 1812 the other day, with a '76 veteran scattered here and

there in the ranks. And as I passed through one of the parks lately,

I came upon a company of boys on parade. Their uniforms were neat, and

their muskets about half the common size. Some of them were not more

than seven or eight years of age; but had evidently been well-drilled.

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 want you to write as soon as I tell you where to direct your letter.

I would let you know now, if I knew myself. I may perhaps be here a week

longer; but I cannot tell. When you write tell me the whereabouts of the

family. My love to Mr. Moffett and Ella. Tell Ella I intend to write to

her soon, whether she wants me to nor not.

Truly your Brother,

SAML L. CLEMENS.

He was in Philadelphia when he wrote the nest letter that has come

down to us, and apparently satisfied with the change. It is a

letter to Orion Clemens, who had disposed of his paper, but

evidently was still in Hannibal. An extended description of a trip

to Fairmount Park is omitted because of its length, its chief

interest being the tendency it shows to descriptive writing--the

field in which he would make his first great fame. There is,

however, no hint of humor, and only a mild suggestion of the author

of the Innocents Abroad in this early attempt. The letter as here

given is otherwise complete, the omissions being indicated.

To Orion Clemens, in Hannibal:

PHILADELPHIA, PA. Oct. 26,1853.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--It was at least two weeks before I left New York, that

I received my last letter from home: and since then, not a word have I

heard from any of you. And now, since I think of it, it wasn't a letter,

either, but the last number of the "Daily Journal," saying that that

paper was sold, and I very naturally supposed from that, that the family

had disbanded, and taken up winter quarters in St. Louis. Therefore, I

have been writing to Pamela, till I've tired of it, and have received no

answer. I have been writing for the last two or three weeks, to send Ma

some money, but devil take me if I knew where she was, and so the money

has slipped out of my pocket somehow or other, but I have a dollar left,

and a good deal owing to me, which will be paid next Monday. I shall

enclose the dollar in this letter, and you can hand it to her. I know

it's a small amount, but then it will buy her a handkerchief, and at the

same time serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in

Philadelphia, for you see it's against the law, in Pennsylvania, to keep

or pass a bill of less denomination than $5. I have only seen two or

three bank bills since I have been in the State. On Monday the hands are

paid off in sparkling gold, fresh from the Mint; so your dreams are not

troubled with the fear of having doubtful money in your pocket.

I am subbing at the Inquirer office. One man has engaged me to work for

him every Sunday till the first of next April, (when I shall return home

to take Ma to Ky;) and another has engaged my services for the 24th of

next month; and if I want it, I can get subbing every night of the week.

I go to work at 7 o'clock in the evening, and work till 3 o'clock the

next morning. I can go to the theatre and stay till 12 o'clock and then

go to the office, and get work from that till 3 the next morning; when I

go to bed, and sleep till 11 o'clock, then get up and loaf the rest of

the day. The type is mostly agate and minion, with some bourgeois; and

when one gets a good agate take,--["Agate," "minion," etc., sizes of

type; "take," a piece of work. Type measurement is by ems, meaning the

width of the letter 'm'.]--he is sure to make money. I made $2.50 last

Sunday, and was laughed at by all the hands, the poorest of whom sets

11,000 on Sunday; and if I don't set 10,000, at least, next Sunday, I'll

give them leave to laugh as much as they want to. Out of the 22

compositors in this office, 12 at least, set 15,000 on Sunday.

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 down-hearted, for there is more work here than

you can do!" "Down-hearted," 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 down-hearted 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....

The grave of Franklin is in Christ Church-yard, corner of Fifth and Arch

streets. They keep the gates locked, and one can only see the flat slab

that lies over his remains and that of his wife; but you cannot see the

inscription distinctly enough to read it. The inscription, I believe,

reads thus:

"Benjamin |

and | Franklin"

Deborah |

I counted 27 cannons (6 pounders) planted in the edge of the sidewalk in

Water St. the other day. They are driven into the ground, about a foot,

with the mouth end upwards. A ball is driven fast into the mouth of

each, to exclude the water; they look like so many posts. They were put

there during the war. I have also seen them planted in this manner,

round the old churches, in N. Y.....

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. The

Phila. 'bus drivers cannot cheat. In the front of the stage is a thing

like an office clock, with figures from 0 to 40, marked on its face.

When the stage starts, the hand of the clock is turned toward the 0.

When you get in and pay your fare, the driver strikes a bell, and the

hand moves to the figure 1--that is, "one fare, and paid for," and there

is your receipt, as good as if you had it in your pocket. When a

passenger pays his fare and the driver does not strike the bell

immediately, he is greeted "Strike that bell! will you?"

I must close now. I intend visiting the Navy Yard, Mint, etc., before I

write again. You must write often. You see I have nothing to write

interesting to you, while you can write nothing that will not interest

me. Don't say my letters are not long enough. Tell Jim Wolfe to write.

Tell all the boys where I am, and to write. Jim Robinson, particularly.

I wrote to him from N. Y. Tell me all that is going on in H--l.

Truly your brother

SAM.

Those were primitive times. Imagine a passenger in these easy-going days

calling to a driver or conductor to "Strike that bell!"

"H--l" is his abbreviation for Hannibal. He had first used it in a title

of a poem which a few years before, during one of Orion's absences, he

had published in the paper. "To Mary in Hannibal" was too long to set as

a display head in single column. The poem had no great merit, but under

the abbreviated title it could hardly fail to invite notice. It was one

of several things he did to liven up the circulation during a brief

period of his authority.

The doubtful money he mentions was the paper issued by private banks,

"wild cat," as it was called. He had been paid with it in New York,

and found it usually at a discount--sometimes even worthless. Wages and

money were both better in Philadelphia, but the fund for his mother's

trip to Kentucky apparently did not grow very rapidly.

The next letter, written a month later, is also to Orion Clemens, who had

now moved to Muscatine, Iowa, and established there a new paper with an

old title, 'The Journal'.

To Orion Clemens, in Muscatine, Iowa:

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 28th, 1853.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--I received your letter today. I think Ma ought to

spend the winter in St. Louis. I don't believe in that climate--it's too

cold for her.

The printers' annual ball and supper came off the other night. The

proceeds amounted to about $1,000. The printers, as well as other

people, are endeavoring to raise money to erect a monument to Franklin,

but there are so many abominable foreigners here (and among printers,

too,) who hate everything American, that I am very certain as much money

for such a purpose could be raised in St. Louis, as in Philadelphia.

I was in Franklin's old office this morning--the "North American"

(formerly "Philadelphia Gazette") and there was at least one foreigner

for every American at work there.

How many subscribers has the Journal got? What does the job-work pay?

and what does the whole concern pay?.....

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.

From some cause, I cannot set type nearly so fast as when I was at home.

Sunday is a long day, and while others set 12 and 15,000, yesterday, I

only set 10,000. However, I will shake this laziness off, soon, I reckon

....

How do you like "free-soil?"--I would like amazingly to see a good

old-fashioned negro.

My love to all

Truly your brother

SAM.

We may believe that it never occurred to the young printer, looking

up landmarks of Ben Franklin, that time would show points of

resemblance between the great Franklin's career and his own. Yet

these seem now rather striking. Like Franklin, he had been taken

out of school very young and put at the printer's trade; like

Franklin, he had worked in his brother's office, and had written for

the paper. Like him, too, he had left quietly for New York and

Philadelphia to work at the trade of printing, and in time Samuel

Clemens, like Benjamin Franklin, would become a world-figure,

many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. The boy Sam

Clemens may have had such dreams, but we find no trace of them.

There is but one more letter of this early period. Young Clemens

spent some time in Washington, but if he wrote from there his

letters have disappeared. The last letter is from Philadelphia and

seems to reflect homesickness. The novelty of absence and travel

was wearing thin.

To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 5, '53.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have already written two letters within the last two

hours, and you will excuse me if this is not lengthy. If I had the

money, I would come to St. Louis now, while the river is open; but within

the last two or three weeks I have spent about thirty dollars for

clothing, so I suppose I shall remain where I am. I only want to return

to avoid night-work, which is injuring my eyes. I have received one or

two letters from home, but they are not written as they should be, and I

know no more about what is going on there than the man in the moon. One

only has to leave home to learn how to write an interesting letter to an

absent friend when he gets back. I suppose you board at Mrs. Hunter's

yet--and that, I think, is somewhere in Olive street above Fifth.

Philadelphia is one of the healthiest places in the Union. I wanted to

spend this winter in a warm climate, but it is too late now. I don't

like our present prospect for cold weather at all.

Truly your brother

SAM.

But he did not return to the West for another half year. The

letters he wrote during that period have not survived. It was late

in the summer of 1854 when he finally started for St. Louis. He sat

up for three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey,

and arrived exhausted. The river packet was leaving in a few hours

for Muscatine, Iowa, where his mother and his two brothers were now

located. He paid his sister a brief visit, and caught the boat.

Worn-out, he dropped into his berth and slept the thirty-six hours

of the journey.

It was early when-he arrived--too early to arouse the family. In

the office of the little hotel where he waited for daylight he found

a small book. It contained portraits of the English rulers, with

the brief facts of their reigns. Young Clemens entertained himself

by learning this information by heart. He had a fine memory for

such things, and in an hour or two had the printed data perfectly

and permanently committed. This incidentally acquired knowledge

proved of immense value to him. It was his groundwork for all

English history.

II

LETTERS 1856-61. KEOKUK, AND THE RIVER. END OF PILOTING

There comes a period now of nearly four years, when Samuel Clemens

was either a poor correspondent or his letters have not been

preserved. Only two from this time have survived--happily of

intimate biographical importance.

Young Clemens had not remained in Muscatine. His brother had no

inducements to offer, and he presently returned to St. Louis, where

he worked as a compositor on the Evening News until the following

spring, rooming with a young man named Burrough, a journeyman

chair-maker with a taste for the English classics. Orion Clemens,

meantime, on a trip to Keokuk, had casually married there, and a

little later removed his office to that city. He did not move the

paper; perhaps it did not seem worth while, and in Keokuk he

confined himself to commercial printing. The Ben Franklin Book and

Job Office started with fair prospects. Henry Clemens and a boy

named Dick Hingham were the assistants, and somewhat later, when

brother Sam came up from St. Louis on a visit, an offer of five

dollars a week and board induced him to remain. Later, when it

became increasingly difficult to pay the five dollars, Orion took

his brother into partnership, which perhaps relieved the financial

stress, though the office methods would seem to have left something

to be desired. It is about at this point that the first of the two

letters mentioned was written. The writer addressed it to his

mother and sister--Jane Clemens having by this time taken up her

home with her daughter, Mrs. Moffett.

To Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

KEOKUK, Iowa, June 10th, 1856.

MY DEAR MOTHER & SISTER,--I have nothing to write. Everything is going

on well. The Directory is coming on finely. I have to work on it

occasionally, which I don't like a particle I don't like to work at too

many things at once. They take Henry and Dick away from me too. Before

we commenced the Directory, I could tell before breakfast just how much

work could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they

throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work.

I have nothing to do with the book--if I did I would have the two book

hands do more work than they do, or else I would drop it. It is not a

mere supposition that they do not work fast enough--I know it; for

yesterday the two book hands were at work all day, Henry and Dick all the

afternoon, on the advertisements, and they set up five pages and a half

--and I set up two pages and a quarter of the same matter after supper,

night before last, and I don't work fast on such things. They are either

excessively slow motioned or very lazy. I am not getting along well with

the job work. I can't work blindly--without system. I gave Dick a job

yesterday, which I calculated he would set in two hours and I could work

off in three, and therefore just finish it by supper time, but he was

transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains

untouched. Through all the great pressure of job work lately, I never

before failed in a promise of the kind.

Your Son

SAM

Excuse brevity this is my 3rd letter to-night.

Samuel Clemens was never celebrated for his patience; we may imagine

that the disorder of the office tried his nerves. He seems, on the

whole, however, to have been rather happy in Keokuk. There were

plenty of young people there, and he was a favorite among them. But

he had grown dissatisfied, and when one day some weeks later there

fell into His hands an account of the riches of the newly explored

regions of the upper Amazon, he promptly decided to find his fortune

at the headwaters of the great South-American river. The second

letter reports this momentous decision. It was written to Henry

Clemens, who was temporarily absent-probably in Hannibal.

To Henry Clemens:

KEOKUK, August 5th, '56.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--..... Ward and I held a long consultation, Sunday

morning, and the result was that we two have determined to start to

Brazil, if possible, in six weeks from now, in order to look carefully

into matters there and report to Dr. Martin in time for him to follow on

the first of March. We propose going via New York. Now, between you and

I and the fence you must say nothing about this to Orion, for he thinks

that Ward is to go clear through alone, and that I am to stop at New York

or New Orleans until he reports. But that don't suit me. My confidence

in human nature does not extend quite that far. I won't depend upon

Ward's judgment, or anybody's else--I want to see with my own eyes, and

form my own opinion. But you know what Orion is. When he gets a notion

into his head, and more especially if it is an erroneous one, the Devil

can't get it out again. So I know better than to combat his arguments

long, but apparently yielded, inwardly determined to go clear through.

Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from

Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St. Louis

and went to New York--I can start to New York and go to South America!

Although Orion talks grandly about furnishing me with fifty or a hundred

dollars in six weeks, I could not depend upon him for ten dollars, so I

have "feelers" out in several directions, and have already asked for a

hundred dollars from one source (keep it to yourself.) I will lay on my

oars for awhile, and see how the wind sets, when I may probably try to

get more. Mrs. Creel is a great friend of mine, and has some influence

with Ma and Orion, though I reckon they would not acknowledge it. I am

going up there tomorrow, to press her into my service. I shall take care

that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with South American books.

They have Herndon's Report now. Ward and the Dr. and myself will hold a

grand consultation tonight at the office. We have agreed that no more

shall be admitted into our company.

I believe the Guards went down to Quincy today to escort our first

locomotive home.

Write soon.

Your Brother,

SAM.

Readers familiar with the life of Mark Twain know that none of the

would-be adventurers found their way to the Amazon: His two

associates gave up the plan, probably for lack of means. Young

Clemens himself found a fifty-dollar bill one bleak November day

blowing along the streets of Keokuk, and after duly advertising his

find without result, set out for the Amazon, by way of Cincinnati

and New Orleans.

"I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day," he

once declared, a statement which we may take with a literary

discount.

He remained in Cincinnati that winter (1856-57) working at his

trade. No letters have been preserved from that time, except two

that were sent to a Keokuk weekly, the Saturday Post, and as these

were written for publication, and are rather a poor attempt at

burlesque humor--their chief feature being a pretended illiteracy

--they would seem to bear no relation to this collection. He roomed

that winter with a rugged, self-educated Scotchman--a mechanic, but

a man of books and philosophies, who left an impress on Mark Twain's

mental life.

In April he took up once more the journey toward South America, but

presently forgot the Amazon altogether in the new career that opened

to him. All through his boyhood and youth Samuel Clemens had wanted

to be a pilot. Now came the long-deferred opportunity. On the

little Cincinnati steamer, the Paul Jones, there was a pilot named

Horace Bixby. Young Clemens idling in the pilot-house was one

morning seized with the old ambition, and laid siege to Bixby to

teach him the river. The terms finally agreed upon specified a fee

to Bixby of five hundred dollars, one hundred down, the balance when

the pupil had completed the course and was earning money. But all

this has been told in full elsewhere, and is only summarized here

because the letters fail to complete the story.

Bixby soon made some trips up the Missouri River, and in his absence

turned his apprentice, or "cub," over to other pilots, such being

the river custom. Young Clemens, in love with the life, and a

favorite with his superiors, had a happy time until he came under a

pilot named Brown. Brown was illiterate and tyrannical, and from

the beginning of their association pilot and apprentice disliked

each other cordially.

It is at this point that the letters begin once more--the first

having been written when young Clemens, now twenty-two years old,

had been on the river nearly a year. Life with Brown, of course,

was not all sorrow, and in this letter we find some of the fierce

joy of adventure which in those days Samuel Clemens loved.

To Onion Clemens and Wife, in Keokuk, Iowa:

SAINT LOUIS, March 9th, 1858.

DEAR BROTHER AND SISTER,--I must take advantage of the opportunity now

presented to write you, but I shall necessarily be dull, as I feel

uncommonly stupid. We have had a hard trip this time. Left Saint Louis

three weeks ago on the Pennsylvania. The weather was very cold, and the

ice running densely. We got 15 miles below town, landed the boat, and

then one pilot. Second Mate and four deck hands took the sounding boat

and shoved out in the ice to hunt the channel. They failed to find it,

and the ice drifted them ashore. The pilot left the men with the boat

and walked back to us, a mile and a half. Then the other pilot and

myself, with a larger crew of men started out and met with the same fate.

We drifted ashore just below the other boat. Then the fun commenced. We

made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men

(both crews) to it like horses, on the shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in

the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, and I took the tiller. We

would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up

on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many

ten-pins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat.

After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the

oars. Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (the first

mentioned pilot,) and myself, took a double crew of fresh men and tried

it again. This time we found the channel in less than half an hour,

and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came along and took us off.

The next day was colder still. I was out in the yawl twice, and then we

got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us. We

went ten miles further, landed, and George and I cleared out again--found

the channel first trial, but got caught in the gorge and drifted

helplessly down the river. The Ocean Spray came along and started into

the ice after us, but although she didn't succeed in her kind intention

of taking us aboard, her waves washed us out, and that was all we wanted.

We landed on an island, built a big fire and waited for the boat. She

started, and ran aground! It commenced raining and sleeting, and a very

interesting time we had on that barren sandbar for the next four hours,

when the boat got off and took us aboard. The next day was terribly

cold. We sounded Hat Island, warped up around a bar and sounded again

--but in order to understand our situation you will have to read Dr. Kane.

It would have been impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria

Denning was aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran

alongside and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had then been out

in the yawl from 4 o'clock in the morning till half past 9 without being

near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men, yawl, ropes and

everything else, and we looked like rock-candy statuary. We got to Saint

Louis this morning, after an absence of 3 weeks--that boat generally

makes the trip in 2.

Henry was doing little or nothing here, and I sent him to our clerk to

work his way for a trip, by measuring wood piles, counting coal boxes,

and other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily. He may go

down with us again, for I expect he likes our bill of fare better than

that of his boarding house.

I got your letter at Memphis as I went down. That is the best place to

write me at. The post office here is always out of my route, somehow or

other. Remember the direction: "S.L.C., Steamer Pennsylvania Care Duval

& Algeo, Wharfboat, Memphis." I cannot correspond with a paper, because

when one is learning the river, he is not allowed to do or think about

anything else.

I am glad to see you in such high spirits about the land, and I hope you

will remain so, if you never get richer. I seldom venture to think about

our landed wealth, for "hope deferred maketh the heart sick."

I did intend to answer your letter, but I am too lazy and too sleepy now.

We have had a rough time during the last 24 hours working through the ice

between Cairo and Saint Louis, and I have had but little rest.

I got here too late to see the funeral of the 10 victims by the burning

of the Pacific hotel in 7th street. Ma says there were 10 hearses, with

the fire companies (their engines in mourning--firemen in uniform,) the

various benevolent societies in uniform and mourning, and a multitude of

citizens and strangers, forming, altogether, a procession of 30,000

persons! One steam fire engine was drawn by four white horses, with

crape festoons on their heads.

Well I am--just--about--asleep--

Your brother

SAM.

Among other things, we gather from this letter that Orion Clemens

had faith in his brother as a newspaper correspondent, though the

two contributions from Cincinnati, already mentioned, were not

promising. Furthermore, we get an intimation of Orion's unfailing

confidence in the future of the "land"--that is to say, the great

tract of land in Eastern Tennessee which, in an earlier day, his

father had bought as a heritage for his children. It is the same

Tennessee land that had "millions in it" for Colonel Sellers--the

land that would become, as Orion Clemens long afterward phrased it,

"the worry of three generations."

The Doctor Kane of this letter is, of course, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane,

the American Arctic explorer. Any book of exploration always

appealed to Mark Twain, and in those days Kane was a favorite.

The paragraph concerning Henry, and his employment on the

Pennsylvania, begins the story of a tragedy. The story has been

fully told elsewhere,--[Mark Twain: A Biography, by same author.]

--and need only be sketched briefly here. Henry, a gentle, faithful

boy, shared with his brother the enmity of the pilot Brown. Some

two months following the date of the foregoing letter, on a down

trip of the Pennsylvania, an unprovoked attack made by Brown upon

the boy brought his brother Sam to the rescue. Brown received a

good pummeling at the hands of the future humorist, who, though

upheld by the captain, decided to quit the Pennsylvania at New

Orleans and to come up the river by another boat. The Brown episode

has no special bearing on the main tragedy, though now in retrospect

it seems closely related to it. Samuel Clemens, coming up the river

on the A. T. Lacey, two days behind the Pennsylvania, heard a voice

shout as they approached the Greenville, Mississippi, landing:

"The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island!

One hundred and fifty lives lost!"

It was a true report. At six o'clock of a warm, mid-June morning,

while loading wood, sixty miles below Memphis, the Pennsylvania's

boilers had exploded with fearful results. Henry Clemens was among

the injured. He was still alive when his brother reached Memphis on

the Lacey, but died a few days later. Samuel Clemens had idolized

the boy, and regarded himself responsible for his death. The letter

that follows shows that he was overwrought by the scenes about him

and the strain of watching, yet the anguish of it is none the less

real.

To Mrs. Onion Clemens:

MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18th, 1858.

DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,--Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry my

darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless

career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness.

(O, God! this is hard to bear.) Hardened, hopeless,--aye, lost--lost

--lost and ruined sinner as I am--I, even I, have humbled myself to the

ground and prayed as never man prayed before, that the great God might

let this cup pass from me--that he would strike me to the earth, but

spare my brother--that he would pour out the fulness of his just wrath

upon my wicked head, but have mercy, mercy, mercy upon that unoffending

boy. The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my

youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are gray

hairs in my head tonight. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside

of my poor burned and bruised, but uncomplaining brother, and then the

star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. Men take

me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me "lucky" because I was not

on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they

know not what they say.

Mollie you do not understand why I was not on that boat--I will tell you.

I left Saint Louis on her, but on the way down, Mr. Brown, the pilot that

was killed by the explosion (poor fellow,) quarreled with Henry without

cause, while I was steering. Henry started out of the pilot-house--Brown

jumped up and collared him--turned him half way around and struck him in

the face!--and him nearly six feet high--struck my little brother. I was

wild from that moment. I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the

insult--and the Captain said I was right--that he would discharge Brown

in N. Orleans if he could get another pilot, and would do it in St.

Louis, anyhow. Of course both of us could not return to St. Louis on the

same boat--no pilot could be found, and the Captain sent me to the A. T.

Lacey, with orders to her Captain to bring me to Saint Louis. Had

another pilot been found, poor Brown would have been the "lucky" man.

I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and I

must tell you the truth, Mollie--three hundred human beings perished by

that fearful disaster. Henry was asleep--was blown up--then fell back on

the hot boilers, and I suppose that rubbish fell on him, for he is

injured internally. He got into the water and swam to shore, and got

into the flatboat with the other survivors.--[Henry had returned once to

the Pennsylvania to render assistance to the passengers. Later he had

somehow made his way to the flatboat.]--He had nothing on but his wet

shirt, and he lay there burning up with a southern sun and freezing in

the wind till the Kate Frisbee came along. His wounds were not dressed

till he got to Memphis, 15 hours after the explosion. He was senseless

and motionless for 12 hours after that. But may God bless Memphis, the

noblest city on the face of the earth. She has done her duty by these

poor afflicted creatures--especially Henry, for he has had five--aye,

ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has

had. Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the

portraits of Webster) sat by him for 36 hours. There are 32 scalded men

in that room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe

him, if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he

passes, "May the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!" The ladies have done

well, too. Our second Mate, a handsome, noble hearted young fellow, will

die. Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side

and handed him a pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy's eyes kindled,

his lips quivered out a gentle "God bless you, Miss," and he burst into

tears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not

forget it.

Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.

Your unfortunate Brother,

SAML. L. CLEMENS.

P. S. I got here two days after Henry.

It is said that Mark Twain never really recovered from the tragedy

of his brother's death--that it was responsible for the serious,

pathetic look that the face of the world's greatest laugh-maker

always wore in repose.

He went back to the river, and in September of the same year, after

an apprenticeship of less than eighteen months, received his license

as a St. Louis and New Orleans pilot, and was accepted by his old

chief, Bixby, as full partner on an important boat. In Life on the

Mississippi Mark Twain makes the period of his study from two to two

and a half years, but this is merely an attempt to magnify his

dullness. He was, in fact, an apt pupil and a pilot of very high

class.

Clemens was now suddenly lifted to a position of importance. The

Mississippi River pilot of those days was a person of distinction,

earning a salary then regarded as princely. Certainly two hundred

and fifty dollars a month was large for a boy of twenty-three. At

once, of course, he became the head of the Clemens family. His

brother Orion was ten years older, but he had not the gift of

success. By common consent the younger brother assumed permanently

the position of family counselor and financier. We expect him to

feel the importance of his new position, and he is too human to

disappoint us. Incidentally, we notice an improvement in his

English. He no longer writes "between you and I"

Fragment of a letter to Orion Clemens. Written at St.

Louis in 1859:

.....I am not talking nonsense, now--I am in earnest, I want you to keep

your troubles and your plans out of the reach of meddlers, until the

latter are consummated, so that in case you fail, no one will know it but

yourself.

Above all things (between you and me) never tell Ma any of your troubles;

she never slept a wink the night your last letter came, and she looks

distressed yet. Write only cheerful news to her. You know that she will

not be satisfied so long as she thinks anything is going on that she is

ignorant of--and she makes a little fuss about it when her suspicions are

awakened; but that makes no difference--. I know that it is better that

she be kept in the dark concerning all things of an unpleasant nature.

She upbraids me occasionally for giving her only the bright side of my

affairs (but unfortunately for her she has to put up with it, for I know

that troubles that I curse awhile and forget, would disturb her slumbers

for some time.) (Parenthesis No. 2--Possibly because she is deprived of

the soothing consolation of swearing.) Tell her the good news and me the

bad.

Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than

otherwise--a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night I was

about to round to for a storm--but concluded that I could find a smoother

bank somewhere. I landed 5 miles below. The storm came--passed away and

did not injure us. Coming up, day before yesterday, I looked at the spot

I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds. We

couldn't have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado. And I am also lucky in

having a berth, while all the young pilots are idle. This is the

luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. Not on account of the wages

--for that is a secondary consideration--but from the fact that the City

of Memphis is the largest boat in the trade and the hardest to pilot, and

consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never

could accomplish on a transient boat. I can "bank" in the neighborhood

of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present

(principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers.)

Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge! and what vast respect

Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I could enter the "Rooms," and

receive only a customary fraternal greeting--but now they say, "Why, how

are you, old fellow--when did you get in?"

And the young pilots who used to tell me, patronizingly, that I could

never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin

at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to "blow my horn," for I

derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must confess that when

I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d---d rascals get a glimpse

of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller

dimensions, whose face I do not exhibit! You will despise this egotism,

but I tell you there is a "stern joy" in it.....

Pilots did not remain long on one boat, as a rule; just why it is not so

easy to understand. Perhaps they liked the experience of change; perhaps

both captain and pilot liked the pursuit of the ideal. In the

light-hearted letter that follows--written to a friend of the family,

formerly of Hannibal--we get something of the uncertainty of the pilot's

engagements.

To Mrs. Elizabeth W. Smith, in Jackson,

Cape Girardeau County, Mo.:

ST. Louis, Oct. 31 [probably 1859].

DEAR AUNT BETSEY,--Ma has not written you, because she did not know when

I would get started down the river again.....

You see, Aunt Betsey, I made but one trip on the packet after you left,

and then concluded to remain at home awhile. I have just discovered this

morning that I am to go to New Orleans on the "Col. Chambers"--fine,

light-draught, swift-running passenger steamer--all modern accommodations

and improvements--through with dispatch--for freight or passage apply on

board, or to--but--I have forgotten the agent's name--however, it makes

no difference--and as I was saying, or had intended to say, Aunt Betsey,

probably, if you are ready to come up, you had better take the "Ben

Lewis," the best boat in the packet line. She will be at Cape Girardeau

at noon on Saturday (day after tomorrow,) and will reach here at

breakfast time, Sunday. If Mr. Hamilton is chief clerk,--very well,

I am slightly acquainted with him. And if Messrs. Carter Gray and Dean

Somebody (I have forgotten his other name,) are in the pilot-house--very

well again-I am acquainted with them. Just tell Mr. Gray, Aunt Betsey

--that I wish him to place himself at your command.

All the family are well--except myself--I am in a bad way again--disease,

Love, in its most malignant form. Hopes are entertained of my recovery,

however. At the dinner table--excellent symptom--I am still as "terrible

as an army with banners."

Aunt Betsey--the wickedness of this world--but I haven't time to moralize

this morning.

Goodbye

SAM CLEMENS.

As we do not hear of this "attack" again, the recovery was probably

prompt. His letters are not frequent enough for us to keep track of

his boats, but we know that he was associated with Bixby from time

to time, and now and again with one of the Bowen boys, his old

Hannibal schoolmates. He was reveling in the river life, the ease

and distinction and romance of it. No other life would ever suit

him as well. He was at the age to enjoy just what it brought him

--at the airy, golden, overweening age of youth.

To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:

ST. LOUIS, Mch. 1860.

MY DEAR BRO.,--Your last has just come to hand. It reminds me strongly

of Tom Hood's letters to his family, (which I have been reading lately).

But yours only remind me of his, for although there is a striking

likeness, your humour is much finer than his, and far better expressed.

Tom Hood's wit, (in his letters) has a savor of labor about it which is

very disagreeable. Your letter is good. That portion of it wherein the

old sow figures is the very best thing I have seen lately. Its quiet

style resembles Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," and "Don Quixote,"

--which are my beau ideals of fine writing.

You have paid the preacher! Well, that is good, also. What a man wants

with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully

beautiful painting which this city has ever seen--Church's "Heart of the

Andes"--which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all

the bloom and glory of a tropical summer--dotted with birds and flowers

of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners,

and twilight groves, and cool cascades--all grandly set off with a

majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in

everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always

a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time which

you saw the first. We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties

minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers,

and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of

grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features.

There is no slurring of perspective effect about it--the most distant

--the minutest object in it has a marked and distinct personality--so that

you may count the very leaves on the trees. When you first see the tame,

ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon

it, and say "Humbug"--but your third visit will find your brain gasping

and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in--and

appreciate it in its fulness--and understand how such a miracle could

have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You

will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections

--your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something--you hardly know what

--will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing,

in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish

the picture--It remains with you still. It is in my mind now--and the

smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it. So much

for the "Heart of the Andes."

Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for

allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at the

Schottische as performed by Miss Castle and myself. She was perfectly

willing for me to dance until 12 o'clock at the imminent peril of my

going to sleep on the after watch--but then she would top off with a very

inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific

broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the Schottische.

I took Ma and the girls in a carriage, round that portion of New Orleans

where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and although it

was a blazing hot dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. To use an

expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were

"hell-bent" on stealing some of the luscious-looking oranges from

branches which overhung the fences, but I restrained them. They were not

aware before that shrubbery could be made to take any queer shape which a

skilful gardener might choose to twist it into, so they found not only

beauty but novelty in their visit. We went out to Lake Pontchartrain in

the cars.

Your Brother

SAM CLEMENS

We have not before heard of Miss Castle, who appears to have been

one of the girls who accompanied Jane Clemens on the trip which her

son gave her to New Orleans, but we may guess that the other was his

cousin and good comrade, Ella Creel. One wishes that he might have

left us a more extended account of that long-ago river journey, a

fuller glimpse of a golden age that has vanished as completely as

the days of Washington.

We may smile at the natural youthful desire to air his reading, and

his art appreciation, and we may find his opinions not without

interest. We may even commend them--in part. Perhaps we no longer

count the leaves on Church's trees, but Goldsmith and Cervantes

still deserve the place assigned them.

He does not tell us what boat he was on at this time, but later in

the year he was with Bixby again, on the Alonzo Child. We get a bit

of the pilot in port in his next.

To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:

"ALONZO CHILD," N. ORLEANS, Sep. 28th 1860.

DEAR BROTHER,--I just received yours and Mollies letter yesterday--they

had been here two weeks--forwarded from St. Louis. We got here

yesterday--will leave at noon to-day. Of course I have had no time, in

24 hours, to do anything. Therefore I'll answer after we are under way

again. Yesterday, I had many things to do, but Bixby and I got with the

pilots of two other boats and went off dissipating on a ten dollar dinner

at a French restaurant breathe it not unto Ma!--where we ate sheep-head,

fish with mushrooms, shrimps and oysters--birds--coffee with brandy burnt

in it, &c &c,--ate, drank and smoked, from 2 p.m. until 5 o'clock, and

then--then the day was too far gone to do any thing.

Please find enclosed and acknowledge receipt of--$20.00

In haste

SAM L. CLEMENS

It should be said, perhaps, that when he became pilot Jane Clemens

had released her son from his pledge in the matter of cards and

liquor. This license did not upset him, however. He cared very

little for either of these dissipations. His one great indulgence

was tobacco, a matter upon which he was presently to receive some

grave counsel. He reports it in his next letter, a sufficiently

interesting document. The clairvoyant of this visit was Madame

Caprell, famous in her day. Clemens had been urged to consult her,

and one idle afternoon concluded to make the experiment. The letter

reporting the matter to his brother is fragmentary, and is the last

remaining to us of the piloting period.

Fragment of a letter to Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:

NEW ORLEANS February 6, 1862.

.....She's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about 28,--say

5 feet 2 and one quarter--would weigh 116--has black eyes and hair--is

polite and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than I

do.

She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were

alone. We sat down facing each other. Then she asked my age. Then she

put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she

had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in. Something after

this style:

MADAME. Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water;

but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your talents lie: you

might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an editor; you have

written a great deal; you write well--but you are rather out of practice;

no matter--you will be in practice some day; you have a superb

constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the world; you have

great powers of endurance; in your profession your strength holds out

against the longest sieges, without flagging; still, the upper part of

your lungs, the top of them is slightly affected--you must take care of

yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and

you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it totally;

then I can almost promise you 86 when you will surely die; otherwise look

out for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful--for you are not of a

long-lived race, that is on your father's side; you are the only healthy

member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the

certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco, and be

careful of yourself..... In some respects you take after your father,

but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived,

energetic side of the house.... You never brought all your energies to

bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it--for instance, you are

self-made, self-educated.

S. L. C. Which proves nothing.

MADAME. Don't interrupt. When you sought your present occupation you

found a thousand obstacles in the way--obstacles unknown--not even

suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matters to

yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask

of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account. To do

all this requires all the qualities I have named.

S. L. C. You flatter well, Madame.

MADAME. Don't interrupt: Up to within a short time you had always lived

from hand to mouth-now you are in easy circumstances--for which you need

give credit to no one but yourself. The turning point in your life

occurred in 1840-7-8.

S. L. C. Which was?

MADAME. A death perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you

what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself;

therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did.

You will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future

seems well sprinkled with misfortune. You will continue upon the water

for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now

.... What is your brother's age? 35--and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an

office? Well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may

get it; he is too visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this

will never do--tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer--a, very good

lawyer--and a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes

many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their

confidence by displaying his instability of character..... The land he

has now will be very valuable after a while--

S. L. C. Say a 50 years hence, or thereabouts. Madame--

MADAME. No--less time-but never mind the land, that is a secondary

consideration--let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to

his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices

under the Government.....

After a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at the end

of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary--try the law

--you will certainly succeed. I am done now. If you have any questions

to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my power, I will answer without

reserve--without reserve.

I asked a few questions of minor importance--paid her $2--and left, under

the decided impression that going to the fortune teller's was just as

good as going to the opera, and the cost scarcely a trifle more--ergo,

I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other

amusements fail. Now isn't she the devil? That is to say, isn't she a

right smart little woman?

When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it. She and Pamela

are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and twenty

quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till I get back, I

reckon.

SAM.

It is not so difficult to credit Madame Caprell with clairvoyant

powers when one has read the letters of Samuel Clemens up to this

point. If we may judge by those that have survived, her prophecy of

literary distinction for him was hardly warranted by anything she

could have known of his past performance. These letters of his

youth have a value to-day only because they were written by the man

who later was to become Mark Twain. The squibs and skits which he

sometimes contributed to the New Orleans papers were bright,

perhaps, and pleasing to his pilot associates, but they were without

literary value. He was twenty-five years old. More than one author

has achieved reputation at that age. Mark Twain was of slower

growth; at that age he had not even developed a definite literary

ambition: Whatever the basis of Madame Caprell's prophecy, we must

admit that she was a good guesser on several matters, "a right smart

little woman," as Clemens himself phrased it.

She overlooked one item, however: the proximity of the Civil War.

Perhaps it was too close at hand for second sight. A little more

than two months after the Caprell letter was written Fort Sumter was

fired upon. Mask Twain had made his last trip as a pilot up the

river to St. Louis--the nation was plunged into a four years'

conflict.

There are no letters of this immediate period. Young Clemens went

to Hannibal, and enlisting in a private company, composed mainly of

old schoolmates, went soldiering for two rainy, inglorious weeks,

by the end of which he had had enough of war, and furthermore had

discovered that he was more of a Union abolitionist than a

slave-holding secessionist, as he had at first supposed.

Convictions were likely to be rather infirm during those early days

of the war, and subject to change without notice. Especially was

this so in a border State.

III

LETTERS 1861-62. ON THE FRONTIER. MINING ADVENTURES.

JOURNALISTIC BEGINNINGS

Clemens went from the battle-front to Keokuk, where Orion was

preparing to accept the appointment prophesied by Madame Caprell.

Orion was a stanch Unionist, and a member of Lincoln's Cabinet had

offered him the secretaryship of the new Territory of Nevada. Orion

had accepted, and only needed funds to carry him to his destination.

His pilot brother had the funds, and upon being appointed "private"

secretary, agreed to pay both passages on the overland stage, which

would bear them across the great plains from St. Jo to Carson City.

Mark Twain, in Roughing It, has described that glorious journey and

the frontier life that followed it. His letters form a supplement

of realism to a tale that is more or less fictitious, though

marvelously true in color and background. The first bears no date,

but it was written not long after their arrival, August 14, 1861.

It is not complete, but there is enough of it to give us a very fair

picture of Carson City, "a wooden town; its population two thousand

souls."

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

(Date not given, but Sept, or Oct., 1861.)

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope you will all come out here someday. But I shan't

consent to invite you, until we can receive you in style. But I guess we

shall be able to do that, one of these days. I intend that Pamela shall

live on Lake Bigler until she can knock a bull down with her fist--say,

about three months.

"Tell everything as it is--no better, and no worse."

Well, "Gold Hill" sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; "Wild cat" isn't

worth ten cents. The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper,

lead, coal, iron, quick silver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris,

(gypsum,) thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers,

Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes

(pronounced Ki-yo-ties,) poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.

I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was "the d---dest

country under the sun."--and that comprehensive conception I fully

subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers

grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over

the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven

tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest

--most unadulterated, and compromising sand--in which infernal soil

nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-brush," ventures to

grow. If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a

dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire--set

them one foot apart and then try to walk through them, you'll understand

(provided the floor is covered 12 inches deep with sand,) what it is to

wander through a sage-brush desert. When crushed, sage brush emits an

odor which isn't exactly magnolia and equally isn't exactly polecat but

is a sort of compromise between the two. It looks a good deal like

grease-wood, and is the ugliest plant that was ever conceived of. It is

gray in color. On the plains, sage-brush and grease-wood grow about

twice as large as the common geranium--and in my opinion they are a very

good substitute for that useless vegetable. Grease-wood is a perfect

--most perfect imitation in miniature of a live oak tree-barring the color

of it. As to the other fruits and flowers of the country, there ain't

any, except "Pulu" or "Tuler," or what ever they call it,--a species of

unpoetical willow that grows on the banks of the Carson--a RIVER, 20

yards wide, knee deep, and so villainously rapid and crooked, that it

looks like it had wandered into the country without intending it, and had

run about in a bewildered way and got lost, in its hurry to get out again

before some thirsty man came along and drank it up. I said we are

situated in a flat, sandy desert--true. And surrounded on all sides by

such prodigious mountains, that when you gaze at them awhile,--and begin

to conceive of their grandeur--and next to feel their vastness expanding

your soul--and ultimately find yourself growing and swelling and

spreading into a giant--I say when this point is reached, you look

disdainfully down upon the insignificant village of Carson, and in that

instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand,

put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it.

As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but like

that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe "they don't run her

now:" Now, although we are surrounded by sand, the greatest part of the

town is built upon what was once a very pretty grassy spot; and the

streams of pure water that used to poke about it in rural sloth and

solitude, now pass through on dusty streets and gladden the hearts of men

by reminding them that there is at least something here that hath its

prototype among the homes they left behind them. And up "King's Canon,"

(please pronounce canyon, after the manner of the natives,) there are

"ranches," or farms, where they say hay grows, and grass, and beets and

onions, and turnips, and other "truck" which is suitable for cows--yes,

and even Irish potatoes; also, cabbage, peas and beans.

The houses are mostly frame, unplastered, but "papered" inside with

flour-sacks sewed together, and the handsomer the "brand" upon the sacks

is, the neater the house looks. Occasionally, you stumble on a stone

house. On account of the dryness of the country, the shingles on the

houses warp till they look like short joints of stove pipe split

lengthwise.

(Remainder missing.)

In this letter is something of the "wild freedom of the West," which

later would contribute to his fame. The spirit of the frontier--of

Mark Twain--was beginning to stir him.

There had been no secretary work for him to do, and no provision for

payment. He found his profit in studying human nature and in

prospecting native resources. He was not interested in mining not

yet. With a boy named John Kinney he made an excursion to Lake

Bigler--now Tahoe--and located a timber claim, really of great

value. They were supposed to build a fence around it, but they were

too full of the enjoyment of camp-life to complete it. They put in

most of their time wandering through the stately forest or drifting

over the transparent lake in a boat left there by lumbermen. They

built themselves a brush house, but they did not sleep in it. In

'Roughing It' he writes, "It never occurred to us, for one thing;

and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough.

We did not wish to strain it."

They were having a glorious time, when their camp-fire got away from

them and burned up their claim. His next letter, of which the

beginning is missing, describes the fire.

Fragment of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and

Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

.....The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the

standard-bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and

waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we could

turn from this scene to the Lake, and see every branch, and leaf, and

cataract of flame upon its bank perfectly reflected as in a gleaming,

fiery mirror. The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our

solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six

miles of us,) rendered the scene very impressive. Occasionally, one of

us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say, "Superb! magnificent!

Beautiful! but-by the Lord God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this

little patch tonight, we'll never live till morning! for if we don't burn

up, we'll certainly suffocate." But he was persuaded to sit up until we

felt pretty safe as far as the fire was concerned, and then we turned in,

with many misgivings. When we got up in the morning, we found that the

fire had burned small pieces of drift wood within six feet of our boat,

and had made its way to within 4 or 5 steps of us on the South side. We

looked like lava men, covered as we were with ashes, and begrimed with

smoke. We were very black in the face, but we soon washed ourselves

white again.

John D. Kinney, a Cincinnati boy, and a first-rate fellow, too, who came

out with judge Turner, was my comrade. We staid at the Lake four days

--I had plenty of fun, for John constantly reminded me of Sam Bowen when

we were on our campaign in Missouri. But first and foremost, for Annie's,

Mollies, and Pamela's comfort, be it known that I have never been guilty

of profane language since I have been in this Territory, and Kinney

hardly ever swears.--But sometimes human nature gets the better of him.

On the second day we started to go by land to the lower camp, a distance

of three miles, over the mountains, each carrying an axe. I don't think

we got lost exactly, but we wandered four hours over the steepest,

rockiest and most dangerous piece of country in the world. I couldn't

keep from laughing at Kinney's distress, so I kept behind, so that he

could not see me. After he would get over a dangerous place, with

infinite labor and constant apprehension, he would stop, lean on his axe,

and look around, then behind, then ahead, and then drop his head and

ruminate awhile.--Then he would draw a long sigh, and say: "Well--could

any Billygoat have scaled that place without breaking his --- ------ neck?"

And I would reply, "No,--I don't think he could." "No--you don't think

he could--" (mimicking me,) "Why don't you curse the infernal place?

You know you want to.--I do, and will curse the --- ------ thieving

country as long as I live." Then we would toil on in silence for awhile.

Finally I told him--"Well, John, what if we don't find our way out of

this today--we'll know all about the country when we do get out." "Oh

stuff--I know enough--and too much about the d---d villainous locality

already." Finally, we reached the camp. But as we brought no provisions

with us, the first subject that presented itself to us was, how to get

back. John swore he wouldn't walk back, so we rolled a drift log apiece

into the Lake, and set about making paddles, intending to straddle the

logs and paddle ourselves back home sometime or other. But the Lake

objected--got stormy, and we had to give it up. So we set out for the

only house on this side of the Lake--three miles from there, down the

shore. We found the way without any trouble, reached there before

sundown, played three games of cribbage, borrowed a dug-out and pulled

back six miles to the upper camp. As we had eaten nothing since sunrise,

we did not waste time in cooking our supper or in eating it, either.

After supper we got out our pipes--built a rousing camp fire in the open

air-established a faro bank (an institution of this country,) on our huge

flat granite dining table, and bet white beans till one o'clock, when

John went to bed. We were up before the sun the next morning, went out

on the Lake and caught a fine trout for breakfast. But unfortunately, I

spoilt part of the breakfast. We had coffee and tea boiling on the fire,

in coffee-pots and fearing they might not be strong enough, I added more

ground coffee, and more tea, but--you know mistakes will happen.--I put

the tea in the coffee-pot, and the coffee in the teapot--and if you

imagine that they were not villainous mixtures, just try the effect once.

And so Bella is to be married on the 1st of Oct. Well, I send her and

her husband my very best wishes, and--I may not be here--but wherever I

am on that night, we'll have a rousing camp-fire and a jollification in

honor of the event.

In a day or two we shall probably go to the Lake and build another cabin

and fence, and get everything into satisfactory trim before our trip to

Esmeralda about the first of November.

What has become of Sam Bowen? I would give my last shirt to have him out

here. I will make no promises, but I believe if John would give him a

thousand dollars and send him out here he would not regret it. He might

possibly do very well here, but he could do little without capital.

Remember me to all my St. Louis and Keokuk friends, and tell Challie and

Hallie Renson that I heard a military band play "What are the Wild Waves

Saying?" the other night, and it reminded me very forcibly of them. It

brought Ella Creel and Belle across the Desert too in an instant, for

they sang the song in Orion's yard the first time I ever heard it. It

was like meeting an old friend. I tell you I could have swallowed that

whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment would have been any

gratification to them.

Love to the young folks,

SAM.

The reference in the foregoing letter to Esmeralda has to do with mining

plans. He was beginning to be mildly interested, and, with his brother

Orion, had acquired "feet" in an Esmeralda camp, probably at a very small

price--so small as to hold out no exciting prospect of riches. In his

next letter he gives us the size of this claim, which he has visited.

His interest, however, still appears to be chiefly in his timber claim on

Lake Bigler (Tahoe), though we are never to hear of it again after this

letter.

To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

CARSON CITY, Oct. 25, 1861.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have just finished reading your letter and Ma's of

Sept. 8th. How in the world could they have been so long coming? You

ask me if I have for gotten my promise to lay a claim for Mr. Moffett.

By no means. I have already laid a timber claim on the borders of a lake

(Bigler) which throws Como in the shade--and if we succeed in getting one

Mr. Jones, to move his saw-mill up there, Mr. Moffett can just consider

that claim better than bank stock. Jones says he will move his mill up

next spring. In that claim I took up about two miles in length by one in

width--and the names in it are as follows: "Sam. L Clemens, Wm. A.

Moffett, Thos. Nye" and three others. It is situated on "Sam Clemens

Bay"--so named by Capt. Nye--and it goes by that name among the

inhabitants of that region. I had better stop about "the Lake," though,

--for whenever I think of it I want to go there and die, the place is so

beautiful. I'll build a country seat there one of these days that will

make the Devil's mouth water if he ever visits the earth. Jim Lampton

will never know whether I laid a claim there for him or not until he

comes here himself. We have now got about 1,650 feet of mining ground

--and if it proves good, Mr. Moffett's name will go in--if not, I can get

"feet" for him in the Spring which will be good. You see, Pamela, the

trouble does not consist in getting mining ground--for that is plenty

enough--but the money to work it with after you get it is the mischief.

When I was in Esmeralda, a young fellow gave me fifty feet in the "Black

Warrior"--an unprospected claim. The other day he wrote me that he had

gone down eight feet on the ledge, and found it eight feet thick--and

pretty good rock, too. He said he could take out rock now if there were

a mill to crush it--but the mills are all engaged (there are only four of

them) so, if I were willing, he would suspend work until Spring. I wrote

him to let it alone at present--because, you see, in the Spring I can go

down myself and help him look after it. There will then be twenty mills

there. Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that

if the war will let us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its

ever costing him a cent of money or particle of trouble. We shall lay

plenty of claims for him, but if they never pay him anything, they will

never cost him anything, Orion and I are not financiers. Therefore, you

must persuade Uncle Jim to come out here and help us in that line.

I have written to him twice to come. I wrote him today. In both letters

I told him not to let you or Ma know that we dealt in such romantic

nonsense as "brilliant prospects," because I always did hate for anyone

to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were--for, if I kept people

in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself,

if they were not realized. You know I never told you that I went on the

river under a promise to pay Bixby $500, until I had paid the money and

cleared my skirts of the possibility of having my judgment criticised.

I would not say anything about our prospects now, if we were nearer home.

But I suppose at this distance you are more anxious than you would be if

you saw us every month-and therefore it is hardly fair to keep you in the

dark. However, keep these matters to yourselves, and then if we fail,

we'll keep the laugh in the family.

What we want now is something that will commence paying immediately.

We have got a chance to get into a claim where they say a tunnel has been

run 150 feet, and the ledge struck. I got a horse yesterday, and went

out with the Attorney-General and the claim-owner--and we tried to go to

the claim by a new route, and got lost in the mountains--sunset overtook

us before we found the claim--my horse got too lame to carry me, and I

got down and drove him ahead of me till within four miles of town--then

we sent Rice on ahead. Bunker, (whose horse was in good condition,)

undertook, to lead mine, and I followed after him. Darkness shut him out

from my view in less than a minute, and within the next minute I lost the

road and got to wandering in the sage brush. I would find the road

occasionally and then lose it again in a minute or so. I got to Carson

about nine o'clock, at night, but not by the road I traveled when I left

it. The General says my horse did very well for awhile, but soon refused

to lead. Then he dismounted, and had a jolly time driving both horses

ahead of him and chasing them here and there through the sage brush (it

does my soul good when I think of it) until he got to town, when both

animals deserted him, and he cursed them handsomely and came home alone.

Of course the horses went to their stables.

Tell Sammy I will lay a claim for him, and he must come out and attend to

it. He must get rid of that propensity for tumbling down, though, for

when we get fairly started here, I don't think we shall have time to pick

up those who fall.....