To Jane Lampton Clemens
12 August 1864 • San Francisco, Calif.
(Author’s copy and MS: CU-MARK and NPV, UCCL 10993)

. . . .

[My ]Dear Mother—

You have portrayed to me so often & so earnestly the benefit of taking frequent exercise, that I know it will please you to learn that I belong to the San F. Olympic Club, whose gymnasium is one of the largest & best appointed in the United States.1 I am glad, now, that you put me in the notion of it, Ma, because if you had not, I never would have thought of it myself. I think it nothing but right to give you the whole credit of it. It has been a great blessing to me. I feel like a new man. I sleep better, I have a healthier appetite, my intellect is clearer, & I have become so strong & hearty that I fully believe twenty years have been added to my life. I feel as if I ought to be very well satisfied with this result, when I reflect that I never was in that gymnasium but once in my life, & that was over three months [ago.] 2

[seven-eighths MS page (about 135 words) missing]

The place where my laugh comes in, though, is where a resident of Milton Place ‸San José‸ read that article & commented on it. He is one of these fellows who is impervious to humor, & he takes everything he finds in a [newspaper ]in dead earnest. Some fellow handed him that article just to see what he would say. (He lives alongside the house the rocket crashed through.) He read it with oppressive solemnity until he came to where the neighbors were expecting the man that went up with the rocket & moved their families out of his way, & then he threw down the paper & turned angrily to his friend & says he: “Moved their families out to give him a show! Was [expectin’ g ] of him down! Now look-a-here,3

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The Olympic Club was organized in 1860 and had about four hundred members. The club’s gymnasium on Sutter Street near Montgomery offered classes in gymnastics, boxing, and fencing. Clemens’s “exercising was confined to studying up jokes to play on his fellow members” (Treat, 31; Langley 1864, 566).

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2 It probably was this letter that Jane Clemens acknowledged on 28 September: “We recived Sam’s scolding letter dated 12th of August if we cant make him write only by making him mad we will have to try that for we would rather have a scolding letter than none” (JLC to OC, MEC, and SLC, 28 Sept 64, NPV, in MTBus, 82). The “scolding,” as opposed to the teasing about the benefits of exercise, may have filled at least part of the gap that follows.

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3 The article referred to was Clemens’s “What a Sky-Rocket Did,” published in the San Francisco Morning Call on 12 August. It is a hoax about an expended rocket crashing through the roof of a tenement on “Milton Place, Bush street,” San Francisco. The object of its satire is William Crawley Hinckley, a former member of the city’s board of supervisors (see ET&S2, 34–37). Clemens’s account of a humorless response to this article survives on a stray manuscript page numbered “3” (NPV). Since a similar account appears in the following letter to Orion and Mollie, which derives in part from the present letter, this stray page probably belongs here. Clemens must have enclosed clippings of “What a Sky-Rocket Did” in this letter and in the next one.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Author’s copy, in MS of 13 and 14 Aug 64 to OC and MEC (307.4–15), Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), is copy-text for ‘My . . . ago.’ (305.1–306.4); a leaf of MS inscribed on one side only, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV), is copy-text for ‘The . . . look-a-here,’ (306.6–15). It is conjectural but probable that the leaf at Vassar is from the MS of this letter (see p. 306, n. 3); the remainder of the MS is missing. Since Clemens revised the text of this MS leaf when copying it into his 13 and 14 Aug 64 letter to Orion and Mollie, it is likely that he also changed the first paragraph of this letter, when copying it into that one, in ways not now detectable.

Previous publication: L1, 305–306.

Provenance:MS of the salutation and first paragraph probably acquired in the Moffett Collection; see p. 462. See McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.

Emendations and textual notes:

My • “My

ago. • ago.”

newspaper • news-|paper

expectin’ g • [possibly ‘expecti’ng’; apostrophe inserted above ‘n’. This ambiguous placement may foreshadow the reading ‘expect’n’ in the revision of the passage included in 13 and 14 Aug 64 to OC and MEC (308.8)]