224 F street
Washington, Dec.
12.
Click to add citation to My Citations.
Bless me, how curious it seems to hear ‸you talk of‸ your “little cub,” & your “Red Riding Hood” & [your & son ]& daughter that are so tall that you must look up to them!—you who seemed almost the youngest lady in the ship.1
But why mourn for Albert Crane? why sorrow for Dr Andrews?—why grieve that the ark hath rested upon Ararat & the animals departed two by two to be seen m no more of Noah & his sons? There are other kangaroos that you can scrape acquaintance with. ? [ th ]There be those that be ‸are‸ lovelier than Dimon—there be ripples of silvery laughter that issue from other lips than Lockwood’s—Cutter is not, but behold we have [Shakspeare ] always with us always. Cheer up—Duncan will drum the old menagerie together again some day.2
I got 3 received a letter from Charlie Langdon this afternoon, the best cub [you ]had in the ship, by long odds. He says the l Learys have busted gone to protest, & that the $1,100 loaned to Dan. Leary by Mr. Nesbit has not been [paid.4 I ]am sorry a little for Nesbit (not much, though,—he might have enjoyed that money in Europe, but he wouldn’t,) & sorry a good deal for Dan Leary, for although he had unpleasant traits, he ‸had‸ more than sufficient generous instincts to make up for them. You don’t believe it, but I do.5
“A good wife would be a perpetual incentive to progress”—& so she would—I never thought of that before—progress from house to house because c I couldn’t pay the rent. The idea is good. I wish I had a chance to try it. But seriously, Madam, you are only just proposing luxuries to Lazarus. That is all. I want a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good—w but where is the wherewithal? It costs sixty dollars ‸nearly two letters‸ a week to keep me.6 If I doubled it, the firm would come to grief the first time anything happened to the senior partner. Manifestly you haven’t looked into this thing. I am as good an economist as anybody, but I can’t turn an inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.7 You haven’t examined into this thing at all, you see.
I was writing a lecture, to-day, to be delivered for the benefit of the widow’s & orphans of the Correspondents’ Club here a month hence, when I got received Charlie’s letter. , to-day. I stopped to answer that, but will finish the lecture to-morrow or next day, & then I will tell you whether I think it will do or not. But seriously again, if I were settled I would quit all nonsense & swindle some poor girl into marrying me. But I don’t ‸wouldn’t‸ expect to be “worthy” of her. I wouldn’t have a girl that I thought I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.
But at the same time, I am worthier of anybody than I was—because, as duly reported in my last, I still never think of swearing, now, & consequently never do it. I ‸Wherefore, I‸ receive your kind hand across the white page with no blush, with ‸no‸ shame, with no hesitation—for as yet I am worthy—I have failed kept the bond—I have failed not in the task you have set me to do.
I am not as lazy as I was—but I am lazy enough yet, for two people. But I am improving all the time. I always make it a point, now, every day, to resolve deliberately to do something the next day. It is a powerful incentive to industry—I wish I had adopted it sooner.
Good-bye. Be you happy, always, in your pleasant family; & when ye are gathered together, remember ye kindly the cubs that are far away. Amen.
Give me another Sermon—
Improvingly, yr friend
Sam L. Clemens.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
Mentioned are Charles Mason Fairbanks (1855–1924), Mary Paine
Fairbanks (b. 1856), and two stepchildren (see the previous letter, n.
10) (Lorenzo Sayles Fairbanks, 552; “Charles M. Fairbanks,
Newspaper Man, Dies,” New York Times,
30 May 1924, 15).
He is fifty years old, & small of his age. He dresses in
homespun, & is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned
farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them
on all possible subjects, & gets them printed on slips
of paper, with his portrait at the head. These he will give to any
man that comes along, whether he has anything against him or not. He
has already written interminable poems on “The Good Ship
Quaker City;” & an “Ode to the
Ocean;” & “Recollections of the
Pleasant Time on Deck Last night”—which
Pleasant Time consisted in his reciting some 75 stanzas of his
poetry to a large party of the passengers convened on the upper
deck. (N&J1, 334) And in 1880 Clemens also replied to a question about Cutter:
“Yes, it is the same mildewed idiot. His friends call him a
lunatic—but that is pretty fulsome flattery; one cannot
become a lunatic without first having brains. Yes, he is the
‘Poet Lariat’” (so named, according to
Clemens, because Andrews “always distorted the phrase
‘Poet Laureate’”) (SLC to Miss Perkins,
30 Apr 80, CtY-BR†; SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks,
31 Mar and 1 Apr 69, CSmH, in MTMF, 89–90).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
Clemens alludes to Genesis 8:4 (“And the ark rested ... upon
the mountains of Ararat”) and mentions Captain Charles C.
Duncan and the following Quaker City passengers:
Dr. Albert Crane of New Orleans; Dr. Edward Andrews of
Albany—dubbed the “Oracle” in his Alta letters; Frederick Dimon and E. K. Lockwood
of Norwalk, Connecticut; and Bloodgood Haviland Cutter
(1817–1906) of Little Neck, Long Island—the
“Poet Lariat” in The Innocents
Abroad (Winterich, no page). Andrews and Cutter became objects
of Clemens’s scorn at the very outset of the excursion. In
late June he referred to Andrews in his notebook as an “old
fool,” and satirized him in an Alta
letter (N&J1, 349; SLC 1867). Twenty years later he
had not modified his opinion. In response to an inquiry about
Andrews’s “reputation, if any, as an art
critic,” Clemens wrote: “He was a quack, not a
doctor. I cannot conceive of his buying a picture of any kind; he had no
taste, no brains, no education; he must have been born in a sty
& reared in a sewer. I am well satisfied he never saw the
day when he could tell an oil painting from a horse-blanket”
(Frederick J. Collier to SLC, 11 Jan 88, CU-MARK; SLC to Collier, 16 Jan 88,
Wiltshire†). Clemens described Cutter in his notebook soon
after the voyage began:
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
See 2
Dec 67 to Fairbanks, n. 3.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 4
Daniel D. Leary and his brothers, Charles C. and Arthur, were business
partners in New York. Charles had owned a share of the Quaker City since April 1865; Daniel apparently purchased his
share in 1867, when he joined the excursion; and Arthur, although not
listed explicitly as an owner, was the ship’s
“husband and agent” and “had the entire
management of employing all the crew, furnishing all supplies and making
all contracts, and receiving all the earnings of the said
ship.” Daniel’s efforts during the trip failed to
sell the vessel, evidently leaving them in financial difficulties. On 18
February 1868, a New York correspondent of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported that the
“Quaker City steamship pleasure
excursion ... has come to a disreputable finale.
It appears that neither the seamen, nor the parties who furnished the
supplies, were paid by the enterprising manager of the excursion, and so
the steamer was seized, and on Saturday was knocked off at auction by
the U.S. Marshal. The seamen’s claims for wages amount to
$9,000.” The 15 February auction brought a mere
$18,000, part of which went to meet the $9,000
claim for wages, and part to cover two claims for supplies totaling
$1,145. Nothing more is known about the
“$1,100 loaned to Dan. Leary” by fellow
passenger Thomas B. Nesbit from Fulton, Missouri. At the request of
several other part owners of the ship, and after Arthur Leary assured a
United States District Court judge that “all claims against
said ship and owners were arranged for and would be duly
paid,” this sale was set aside. The ship was reauctioned on
11 April, bringing $40,000 this time—still a
disappointment, since the Learys originally hoped to get
$250,000 for it (Wilson 1867, 599; Heyl, 355–56; New York Herald: “Yesterday morning
...,” 16 Feb 68, 6; “The Steamship Quaker
City—Order to Stay Proceedings of Sale,” 19 Feb
68, 5; “Letter from New York,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 17 Mar 68, 1; “Home
News,” New York Tribune, 13 Apr 68,
8).
the
captain is a psalm singer and [so are] quite a number of
others on board and they managed to get up quite a
“revival” among themselves. They commenced with
services once on Sunday, and finally we had it every evening and twice
on Sunday, which did not suit myself or about a dozen other of the best
people on board. (Leary to Arthur Leary, 1 July 67, transcript, CU-MARK, in Leary, 199)
Click to add citation to My Citations. 5
At the start of the voyage, Daniel Leary wrote his brother Arthur in a
way that suggests why Clemens found him possessed of
“generous instincts.” Leary complained that
Click to add citation to My Citations. 6
At this time Clemens was writing roughly two letters per week: one to the
Alta and one to the Enterprise. The revision in this sentence suggests that he was
paid about thirty dollars apiece for them.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 7
See 4
Dec 68 to OLL (2nd of 2), n. 7.
Source text(s):MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14219).
Previous publication:
L2, 133–136; MTMF, 6–9.
Provenance:
see Huntington Library, p. 512.
Emendations and textual notes:
your & son • [sic]
th • [partly formed]
Shakspeare • Shaksp[◊◊]re [inkblot]
you • you you [corrected miswriting]
paid. I • paid.—| I
