To C. F. Sterling
24 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: ViU, UCCL 00563)

Buffalo, Jan. 24.

Dear Sir:

It isn’t any hardship to receive a letter like yours, nor to write & say thank you, & right cordially, too, for it.1

I know that Tifft House—& I never could understand why they make such invidious distinctions & show such a mean partiality, these Buffalo people, in always callin referring to that place out yonder in the extreme edge of town as the poor-house, just as if the Tifft warn’t in existence.2

Yrs Sincerely

Mark Twain.

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 In his letter Sterling had alluded to Mark Twain’s recent complaint about the burden of letter writing—“One of Mankind’s Bores,” in the February Galaxy (SLC 1871, 318–19):

UCLC31744

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(CU-MARK)

Clemens noted on Sterling’s letter:

Jan. 24, 1871.

Received on a low spirited day, & preserved for the comfort it brought.

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2 The Tifft House, one of Buffalo’s most prominent hotels, opened in 1865. Clemens knew it well, having stayed there during his first visit to Buffalo in July 1869. In February 1870 some of the wedding guests who accompanied him and Olivia to Buffalo took rooms there. The “poor-house” probably was the Home for Aged and Destitute Females on Rhode Island Street, maintained by Buffalo’s Church Charity Foundation (Severance, 177–78; L3, 281 n. 4; Buffalo Directory 1871, 53).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L4, 309–10.

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