148 Asylum st.
Hartford, Conn. Oct. 7.0
Dear Ned—
I am here, getting out a book. I saw your father & mother & Gerty often in New York—& also Mr. Brown of the Legation. We all concocted a Treaty article together, for the N. Y. Tribune.1
Do you remember your Honolulu joke?—“If a man compel thee to go with him a mile, go with him, Twain.” I have closed many & many a lecture, in many a city, with that. It always “fetches” them.2 I w Send me your picture—I enclose mine.3
Yr. friend.
Mark Twain.
[docketed in pencil by Burlingame on back of letter:] S.S. Clemens, | Hartford, | Oct. 7, ’68 | [flourish]
Explanatory Notes
Clemens himself had been recently “fetched” by
Burlingame’s joke. After Clemens’s second lecture
in Virginia City, the Territorial Enterprise
reported that he was yesterday made the recipient at the hands of Mr.
Conrad Wiegand, the well known assayer, of a very beautiful and
highly-polished silver brick, worth some $40. The brick
bears the following inscription: “Mark
Twain—Matthew, V: 41—Pilgrim.” All
our readers will recollect at once that the verse referred to reads
as follows: “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a
mile, go with him twain.” Twain would never object to
going even farther, if sure of getting a fellow to the bar presented
him by Mr. Wiegand, and provided he was furnished a seat in a good,
easy-going and softly-cushioned carriage. (“A Neat and
Appropriate Present,” 29 Apr 1868, 3) Eventually, however, Clemens grew tired of the joke, saying in 1906: When it was new, it seemed exceedingly happy and
bright, but it has been emptied upon me upwards of several million times
since—never by a witty and engaging lad like Burlingame, but
always by chuckle-heads of base degree, who did it with offensive
eagerness and with the conviction that they were the first in the field. (AD, 20 Feb 1906, AutoMT1)
The enclosure has not been found, but it was probably a small, carte de visite print of the Bradley and Rulofson
photograph recently made in San Francisco, rather than an
“imperial-size” print of the one taken in
Cleveland (see 1 and 5 May 1868, n. 7, and 24 Sept 1868, n. 3, both to Fairbanks).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
Sotheby’s, 29 October 1996, lot 250; Remember When Auctions, 7 October 1995, no. 37, lot 775, partial publication; Swann Galleries, 14 September 1993, no. 1633, lot 359, partial publication; L2, 261; possibly extracted in a 1968 issue of The Collector: A Magazine for Autograph and Historical Collectors, published by Walter R. Benjamin, Autographs, New York (now Hunter), N.Y., although its appearance there has not been verified; Clemens 1932, 18.
Provenance:
Cyril Clemens saw and transcribed the MS sometime before 1932. Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs bought it from the Seven Gables Bookshop in 1974. Swann Galleries listed it for sale in 1993; Remember When Auctions listed it in 1995. The Jacobses finally sold it through Sotheby’s in October 1996; it was then or soon thereafter bought by the Copley Library (CLjC). The whole of CLjC was in turn sold in May 2011, and the location of this letter is not now known.
