DEAR REDPATH,--I wish you would get me released from the lecture at
Buffalo. I mortally hate that society there, and I don't doubt they
hired me. I once gave them a packed house free of charge, and they never
even had the common politeness to thank me. They left me to shift for
myself, too, a la Bret Harte at Harvard. Get me rid of Buffalo!
Otherwise I'll have no recourse left but to get sick the day I lecture
there. I can get sick easy enough.
I send you No. 5 today. I have written and re-written the first half of
it three different times, yesterday and today, and at last Mrs. Clemens
says it will do. I never saw a woman so hard to please about things she
doesn't know anything about. Yours ever, MARK.
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.