Explanatory Notes
One day I was playing billiards with Mark in his new house, and I said: “Why don’t
you get a photograph of the house? I would like one.” “I have got one,” said he,
“and I’ll get it for you.” And he started to look for it in a desk while I went on playing.
“This is it,” he’d say, and then he’d drawl, “No, it
isn’t,” and go on hunting. Finally, he gave it up. Three months afterward I received the little
picture you have. On the back of it was written, “This is it, Brush,”—just as if the
conversation had just happened. (“Memories of Mark Twain,” Buffalo Express, 1
May 1910, sec. 1:3) Clemens’s billiard room evidently was ready for use by late September or early October 1874.
Allowing for the interval of three months that Brush remembered, and for the fact that by July 1875 he had left Hartford
(beginning with that month, city directories no longer listed him), Clemens must have written this letter sometime in the
first half of that year. He might have done so around the time he sent an unidentified photograph of his house (possibly the
same late fall or early winter image) in the previous letter, to Watt. The photograph inscribed for Brush was published with
the letter text in the Buffalo Express; the original print has not been found, and the published
version was clearly cropped. The image reproduced here was supplied from the only print now known to survive, a stereopticon
view.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 362.
