To Mary Mason Fairbanks
30 January 1868 • Washington, D.C.
(MS: CSmH, UCCL 00186)

. . . .

Jan. [30].

P.S.—I confess, humbly, that I deserve all you have said, & [promise ]that I will rigidly eschew slang & vulgarity in future, even in foolish dinner speeches, when on my guard.1

And now, won’t you cut out s & send to me all your printed letters,2 for I need notes very badly to write from. My book is to make about 600 pages, & I find that my published letters, even copiously illustrated, will only make 250 pages.3 I am afraid that to write 5 or 6 newspapers letters a week & a book beside, is going to be more than I can do.

Always your grateful
Debtor & your friend

Sam. L. Clemens,

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 As Clemens predicted on 24 January, Mrs. Fairbanks had since seen and criticized his “verbatimly” reported response to the toast to “Woman” delivered at the Newspaper Correspondents’ Club dinner on 11 January. Neither her letter, which awaited him on his return to Washington, nor the body of his, to which this postscript presumably belonged, has been found.

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2 Mrs. Fairbanks’s Quaker City letters to the Cleveland Herald; see 24 Jan 68 to Fairbanks, n. 4.

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3 By 26 January, the Alta had published thirty-six Quaker City letters, and Clemens had received clippings of fewer than that.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14220). Clemens gave this single MS leaf its own dateline and labeled it a postscript, probably to a now-lost letter to Fairbanks. A less likely possibility is that he intended it as a delayed addendum to his 24 January letter to Fairbanks, separately mailed six days later.

Previous publication: L2, 170–171; MTMF, 16–17.

Provenance: see Huntington Library, p. 512.

Emendations and textual notes:

30 • [‘0’ malformed and easily misread as ‘1’ or‘d’]

promise • prmomise