MY DEAR BRO.,--I am glad you do not want the clerkship, for that Patent
Office is in such a muddle that there would be no security for the
permanency of a place in it. The same remark will apply to all
offices here, now, and no doubt will, till the close of the present
administration.
Any man who holds a place here, now, stands prepared at all times to
vacate it. You are doing, now, exactly what I wanted you to do a year
ago.
We chase phantoms half the days of our lives.
It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
I am in for it. I must go on chasing them until I marry--then I am done
with literature and all other bosh,--that is, literature wherewith to
please the general public.
I shall write to please myself, then. I hope you will set type till you
complete that invention, for surely government pap must be nauseating
food for a man--a man whom God has enabled to saw wood and be
independent. It really seemed to me a falling from grace, the idea
of going back to San Francisco nothing better than a mere postmaster,
albeit the public would have thought I came with gilded honors, and in
great glory.
I only retain correspondence enough, now, to make a living for myself,
and have discarded all else, so that I may have time to spare for
the book. Drat the thing, I wish it were done, or that I had no other
writing to do.
This is the place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There isn't
one man in Washington, in civil office, who has the brains of Anson
Burlingame--and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great
talents to the world, this government would have discarded him when his
time was up.
There are more pitiful intellects in this Congress! Oh, geeminy! There
are few of them that I find pleasant enough company to visit.
I am most infernally tired of Wash. and its “attractions.” To be busy is
a man's only happiness--and I am--otherwise I should die
Yrs. aff.
SAM.
The secretarial position with Senator Stewart was short-lived. One
cannot imagine Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, and doubtless
there was little to be gained on either side by the arrangement.
They parted without friction, though in later years, when Stewart
had become old and irascible, he used to recount a list of
grievances and declare that he had been obliged to threaten violence
in order to bring Mark to terms; but this was because the author of
Roughing It had in that book taken liberties with the Senator, to
the extent of an anecdote and portrait which, though certainly
harmless enough, had for some reason given deep offense.
Mark Twain really had no time for secretary work. For one thing he
was associated with John Swinton in supplying a Washington letter to
a list of newspapers, and then he was busy collecting his Quaker
City letters, and preparing the copy for his book. Matters were
going well enough, when trouble developed from an unexpected
quarter. The Alta-California had copyrighted the letters and
proposed to issue them in book form. There had been no contract
which would prevent this, and the correspondence which Clemens
undertook with the Alta management led to nothing. He knew that he
had powerful friends among the owners, if he could reach them
personally, and he presently concluded to return to San Francisco,
make what arrangement he could, and finish his book there. It was
his fashion to be prompt; in his next letter we find him already on
the way.
*****
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis: