To Charles Cole Hine
10 February 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00424)

c

My Dear Mr. Hine—

You make out a very strong case—there can be no question about that; & if you had made it out a single month earlier it would have been potent. I would have succumbed. But now I am married—I renounce my former life & all its belongings. I have begun a new life & a new system, a new dispensation. And the bottom rule of this latter is,

To Work No More than is Absolutely Necessary.

I’ve got plenty of money & plenty of credit—& so I won’t write about your wicked & dreadful insurance business1 till my gas bills go to protest & the milk-man ceases to toot his matutinal horn before the gates of

Yours Truly & Defiantly,

Samℓ. L. Clemens
“Mark Twain”

Personal. | C. C. Hine Esq | P.O. BOX 3688 | New York [on the flap:] c [postmarked] buffalo n.y.[ feb 11] [and] 7 00 pm [mail]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Since 1868 Hine (1825–97) had been editor of the monthly Insurance Monitor, which was established in 1853 and was “the oldest insurance journal in the United States, and the largest in the world,” with a circulation of 24,000. He remained its editor until his death (Rowell, 706; Mott 1938, 94 n. 214). Hine was also the author of Eighteen Years in the Office of the Insurance Monitor: A History of Life Insurance in the United States (New York: Insurance Monitor, 1870). His “very strong case” for an article by Clemens probably consisted, at least in part, of recalling Clemens’s “How, For Instance?” which mocked the advertised coverages of an accident insurance company. First published in the New York Weekly Review on 29 September 1866, that sketch was reprinted the following year as “An Inquiry About Insurances” in the Jumping Frog book (SLC 1866, 1867).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L4, 69–70.

Provenance:donated to CU-MARK in 1980 by Mrs. Dorothy Clark, who had inherited it from her father, an employee of Charles C. Hine.

Emendations and textual notes:

feb 11 • [fb 11] [badly inked]

mail • m [ai] l [badly inked]