work, 8 or 9 hours a day, and has nearly killed me.
Now the favor I ask of you is that you will have the words "Ah Sin, a Drama," printed in the middle of a note-paper page and send the same to me, with Bill.We don't want anybody to know that we are building this play.I can't get this title page printed here without having to lie so much that the thought of it is disagreeable to one reared as I have been.
And yet the title of the play must be printed--the rest of the application for copyright is allowable in penmanship.
We have got the very best gang of servants in America, now.When George first came he was one of the most religious of men.He had but one fault--young George Washington's.But I have trained him; and now it fairly breaks Mrs.Clemens's heart to hear George stand at that front door and lie to the unwelcome visitor.But your time is valuable; I must not dwell upon these things.....I'll ask Warner and Harte if they'll do Blindfold Novelettes.Some time I'll simplify that plot.All it needs is that the hanging and the marriage shall not be appointed for the same day.I got over that difficulty, but it required too much MS to reconcile the thing--so the movement of the story was clogged.
I came near agreeing to make political speeches with our candidate for Governor the 16th and 23 inst., but I had to give up the idea, for Harte and I will be here at work then.
Yrs ever, MARK
Mark Twain was writing few letters these days to any one but Howells, yet in November he sent one to an old friend of his youth, Burrough, the literary chair-maker who had roomed with him in the days when he had been setting type for the St.Louis Evening News.
To Mr.Burrough, of St.Louis:
HARTFORD, Nov.1, 1876.
MY DEAR BURROUGHS,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 20years ago.The portrait is correct.You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it.You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug....imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.
Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness--and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all.That is what I was at 19 and 20; and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today.Northerners, too, of a certain grade.It is of children like this that voters are made.And such is the primal source of our government! A man hardly knows whether to swear or cry over it.
I think I comprehend the position there--perfect freedom to vote just as you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think--social ostracism, otherwise.The same thing exists here, among the Irish.
An Irish Republican is a pariah among his people.Yet that race find fault with the same spirit in Know-Nothingism.
Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely.I live in the freest corner of the country.There are no social disabilities between me and my Democratic personal friends.
We break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each other's political opinions.
Don't you ever come to New York again and not run up here to see me.ISuppose we were away for the summer when you were East; but no matter, you could have telegraphed and found out.We were at Elmira N.Y.and right on your road, and could have given you a good time if you had allowed us the chance.
Yes, Will Bowen and I have exchanged letters now and then for several years, but I suspect that I made him mad with my last--shortly after you saw him in St.Louis, I judge.There is one thing which I can't stand and won't stand, from many people.That is sham sentimentality--the kind a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in the "happy days of yore," the "sweet yet melancholy past," with its "blighted hopes" and its "vanished dreams" and all that sort of drivel.
Will's were always of this stamp.I stood it years.When I get a letter like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me the stomach ache.And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer.I told him to stop being 16 at 40; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet melancholy past, and take a pill.I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is the past--can't be restored.Well, I exaggerated some of these truths a little--but only a little--but my idea was to kill his sham sentimentality once and forever, and so make a good fellow of him again.
I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable and I asked him to write and thank me honestly for doing him the best and kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him --but he hasn't done it yet.Maybe he will, sometime.I am grateful to God that I got that letter off before he was married (I get that news from you) else he would just have slobbered all over me and drowned me when that event happened.
I enclose photograph for the young ladies.I will remark that I do not wear seal-skin for grandeur, but because I found, when I used to lecture in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes, in these high latitudes.I wish you had sent pictures of yourself and family--I'll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you are commercially inclined.
Your old friend, SAML L.CLEMENS.