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