To Dean Sage
28 March 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: Lamb, UCCL 12097)

Hartford Mch 28.

My Dear Sage—

You’ve got the date right; but we shan’t want to go outside of your own door-yard till we shove for Hartford—not even to attend prayer meeting. Don’t want to dine with anybody but you; don’t want any social intercourse that will take us outside of your snuggery. We are coming for a reposeful, tranquilizing, rejuvenating private debauch, & a clandestine good time. We appreciate your good intentions, but they are misguided, my boy, & evince a vast misapprehension of the peculiar lusts of your guests & your own attractions. The cheerful jug, the contemplative cigar, holy conversation, & isolation from the world—these are the things that are precious to us; & all things else hold we to be valueless.1

We will telegraph you what time to expect us at your office.2

Truly yours

S. L. Clemens

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens and Twichell planned to visit Sage and his wife at their Brooklyn home in mid-April (see pp. 446, 449, and 22 Apr 75 to Sage). Sage (1841–1902), an 1861 graduate of Albany Law School, worked for H. W. Sage and Company, his father’s New York lumber firm. An avid sportsman, he owned an exceptional library of books on angling, and he contributed articles on the subject to the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and other magazines. Clemens probably first met the Sages through the Langdons or through Twichell, all close friends of theirs. Like his father, Henry W. Sage, Dean Sage was a generous benefactor of Cornell University (L4, 474 n. 2; AD, 23 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:137–39).

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2 Before May 1875 H. W. Sage and Company was located in New York at 110 Front Street, evidently the office, and at the foot of East Thirty-second street, evidently the lumberyard. By 1 May 1875, at the latest, the office had moved to 67 Wall Street (Wilson: 1874, 1135; 1875, 1158).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1999 by Peter Lamb, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.

Previous publication: L6, 431.