To Anson Burlingame
19 February 1868 • (2nd of 2) • Washington, D.C.
(MS: DLC, UCCL 00195)

Your Excellency

This is to duplicate a letter I wrote you today by the unreliable Overland [Mail1 . ]—wherein was set forth that I shall have completed my book in the course of a couple of months or so, & then I would like to go with your Embassy as a dignitary of some kind or other, & privately on my own hook as Herald & Tribune correspondent. I want to be a mild sort of dignitary, though, particularly. Pray save me a place. Correspondents will hover about the Expedition anyhow, & so it will be best for the interests of China & the world, that one of them, at least, should be reliable.

With kindest regards to [ you my ] s Sandwich Islands acquaintances among your now exceedingly large family,2 I remain,

Yours Very Truly

Mark Twain

[letter docketed:] M. Twain, etc.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 See the previous letter. Presumably this duplicate was sent by the slower but more reliable Pacific Mail Steamship line; it did, in fact, reach Burlingame, in whose papers it has survived.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 Clemens makes a playful reference to the large size of Burlingame’s household staff, some of whom he apparently met in Honolulu. Burlingame’s current entourage numbered nearly thirty officials, servants, and translators (“Arrival of the Chinese Embassy,” San Francisco Alta California, 1 Apr 68, 1).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Papers of the Burlingame Family, Library of Congress (DLC).

Previous publication: L2, 187–188.

Provenance:donated to DLC in 1955 by Roger Burlingame.

Emendations and textual notes:

18 19 • 19 8

Mail. • [period doubtful]

you my • [‘my’ over wiped-out ‘you’]