To James Redpath
8 January 1870 • Albany, N.Y.
(MS: ViU, UCCL 00405)

Albany,1 Jan. 8.

Friend Redpath—

Cohoes was another infernal no-season-ticket concern—paid me in 7,000 ten-cent shin-plasters, so that my freight cost more back to Albany than my passage did.2 I hate these one-horse concerns. I have no regular season courses lately. They call them regular courses, but are not respectable, & have no season tickets.3 We have had good houses, but would have had better if their system had been the right one.

But I am wandering from the object of this letter—which is not to kick up, now, when the long agony is nearly over, but to ask Mr. Fall to send my bill to Elmira so that it will reach there about Jan. 25th or 27th—& then I can dispute the items & raise Cain with him before the wedding—couldn’t get mad [enough ] after it, unless you allow time on it when people are peculiarly situated. I do not think you are men who would take advantage of a man’s situation & send in a bill at a time when he couldn’t naturally have presence of mind enough to dispute it.4 And what is the use of having a bill unless you can dispute it? {I sent you $125 the other day—did you get it?}5

Yrs,

Clemens.

[letter docketed:] S. L. Clemens | Albany N. Y. Jan. 8 ’70

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Clemens’s business in Albany, about eight miles south of Troy, probably concerned his lecture there on Monday, 10 January. He returned to Troy later in the day, remaining there through part of 10 January (“City Notes,” Troy Times, 10 Jan 70, 3).

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2 Clemens’s actual fee in Cohoes is not known. His usual fee at this time varied between $75 and $100, with a high of $120 in Pittsburgh, where he opened the Mercantile Library Association’s lecture course (L3, 382 n. 2, 384 n. 9).

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3 The previous December Clemens had canceled one such engagement in Brooklyn (L3, 417–21). By July 1870 the Boston Lyceum Bureau had published twelve “Hints to Lyceums,” two of which urged applicants to “state whether you represent an organization or propose to act independently,” and “whether you shall have one or more lectures: if more than one, how many, and whether you intend to sell season tickets” (Lyceum 1870, 1).

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4 George L. Fall (1837–75) was Redpath’s partner in the Boston Lyceum Bureau from 1868 until 1873, when poor health compelled his retirement. In 1875 he was about to return to the bureau when, on 5 May, he died suddenly from “hemorrhage of the lungs” (“Deaths,” Boston Evening Transcript, 6 May 75, 4). In memorializing Fall, Redpath lauded his integrity, courage, and “perfect purity of character”:

As a business man, he was trustworthy, exact, methodical, clear-headed, punctual, and truthful; and all in the highest degree. His system was so admirable that he was a synonyme among those who knew him for clerical infallibility. During his last business year in the Bureau, although he answered thousands of letters, each involving railroad rides, dates, and distances,—the year work of a hundred lecturers, as well as of concerts,—he did not make a single mistake. His judgment was so rarely at fault that he was constantly consulted as to their own business by scores of persons with whom he was brought into official relations.

Fall, he concluded, was “a man not of genius, but character, which is less shining, but of a purer light” (Redpath 1875).

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5 Redpath had billed Clemens for the Boston Lyceum Bureau’s ten percent commission on his recent lecture fees (Pond, 541; Eubank, 128–32).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).

Previous publication: L4, 10–11.

Provenance:deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.

Emendations and textual notes:

enough • enought