12 December 1867 • Washington, D.C. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00172)
Bless me, how curious it seems to hear you talk of your “little cub,” & your “Red Riding Hood” & your & son Ⓐemendation& daughter that are so tall that you must look up to them!—you who seemed almost the youngest lady in the ship.1explanatory note
But why mourn for Albert Crane? why sorrow for Dr Andrews?—why grieve that the ark hath rested upon Ararat & the animals departed two by two to be seen m no more of Noah & his sons? There are other kangaroos that you can scrape acquaintance with. ? th ⒶemendationThere be those that be are lovelier than Dimon—there be ripples of silvery laughter that issue from other lips than Lockwood’s—Cutter is not, but behold we have Shakspeare Ⓐemendation always with us always. Cheer up—Duncan will drum the old menagerie together again some day.2explanatory note
I got 3explanatory note received a letter from Charlie Langdon this afternoon, the best cub you Ⓐemendationhad in the ship, by long odds. He says the l Learys have busted gone to protest, & that the $1,100 loaned to Dan. Leary by Mr. Nesbit has not been paid.4explanatory note I Ⓐemendationam sorry a little for Nesbit (not much, though,—he might have enjoyed that money in Europe, but he wouldn’t,) & sorry a good deal for Dan Leary, for although he had unpleasant traits, he had more than sufficient generous instincts to make up for them. You don’t believe it, but I do.5explanatory note
“A good wife would be a perpetual incentive to progress”—& so she would—I never thought of that before—progress from house to house because c I couldn’t pay the rent. The idea is good. I wish I had a chance to try it. But seriously, Madam, you are only just proposing luxuries to Lazarus. That is all. I want a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good—w but where is the wherewithal? It costs sixty dollars nearly two letters a week to keep me.6explanatory note If I doubled it, the firm would come to grief the first time anything happened to the senior partner. Manifestly you haven’t looked into this thing. I am as good an economist as anybody, but I can’t turn an inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.7explanatory note You haven’t examined into this thing at all, you see.
I was writing a lecture, to-day, to be delivered for the benefit of the widow’s & orphans of the Correspondents’ Club here a month hence, when I got received Charlie’s letter. , to-day. I stopped to answer that, but will finish the lecture to-morrow or next day, & then I will tell you whether I think it will do or not. But seriously again, if I were settled I would quit all nonsense & swindle some poor girl into marrying me. But I don’t wouldn’t expect to be “ worthy ” of her. I wouldn’t have a girl that I thought I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.
But at the same time, I am worthier of anybody than I was—because, as duly reported in my last, I still never think of swearing, now, & consequently never do it. I Wherefore, I receive your kind hand across the white page with no blush, with no shame, with no hesitation—for as yet I am worthy—I have failed kept the bond—I have failed not in the task you have set me to do.
I am not as lazy as I was—but I am lazy enough yet, for two people. But I am improving all the time. I always make it a point, now, every day, to resolve deliberately to do something the next day. It is a powerful incentive to industry—I wish I had adopted it sooner.
Good-bye. Be you happy, always, in your pleasant family; & when ye are gathered together, remember ye kindly the cubs that are far away. Amen.
Mentioned are Charles Mason Fairbanks (1855–1924), Mary Paine Fairbanks (b. 1856), and two stepchildren (see the previous letter, n. 10) (Lorenzo Sayles Fairbanks, 552; “Charles M. Fairbanks, Newspaper Man, Dies,” New York Times, 30 May 1924, 15).
Clemens alludes to Genesis 8:4 (“And the ark rested ... upon the mountains of Ararat”) and mentions Captain Charles C. Duncan and the following Quaker City passengers: Dr. Albert Crane of New Orleans; Dr. Edward Andrews of Albany—dubbed the “Oracle” in his Alta letters; Frederick Dimon and E. K. Lockwood of Norwalk, Connecticut; and Bloodgood Haviland Cutter (1817–1906) of Little Neck, Long Island—the “Poet Lariat” in The Innocents Abroad (Winterich, no page). Andrews and Cutter became objects of Clemens’s scorn at the very outset of the excursion. In late June he referred to Andrews in his notebook as an “old fool,” and satirized him in an Alta letter (N&J1, 349; SLC 1867). Twenty years later he had not modified his opinion. In response to an inquiry about Andrews’s “reputation, if any, as an art critic,” Clemens wrote: “He was a quack, not a doctor. I cannot conceive of his buying a picture of any kind; he had no taste, no brains, no education; he must have been born in a sty & reared in a sewer. I am well satisfied he never saw the day when he could tell an oil painting from a horse-blanket” (Frederick J. Collier to SLC, 11 Jan 88, CU-MARK; SLC to Collier, 16 Jan 88click to open link, Wiltshire†). Clemens described Cutter in his notebook soon after the voyage began:
He is fifty years old, & small of his age. He dresses in homespun, & is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all possible subjects, & gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head. These he will give to any man that comes along, whether he has anything against him or not. He has already written interminable poems on “The Good Ship Quaker City;” & an “Ode to the Ocean;” & “Recollections of the Pleasant Time on Deck Last night”—which Pleasant Time consisted in his reciting some 75 stanzas of his poetry to a large party of the passengers convened on the upper deck. (N&J1, 334)
And in 1880 Clemens also replied to a question about Cutter: “Yes, it is the same mildewed idiot. His friends call him a lunatic—but that is pretty fulsome flattery; one cannot become a lunatic without first having brains. Yes, he is the ‘Poet Lariat’” (so named, according to Clemens, because Andrews “always distorted the phrase ‘Poet Laureate’”) (SLC to Miss Perkins, 30 Apr 80click to open link, CtY-BR†; SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 31 Mar and 1 Apr 69click to open link, CSmH, in MTMF , 89–90).
Daniel D. Leary and his brothers, Charles C. and Arthur, were business partners in New York. Charles had owned a share of the Quaker City since April 1865; Daniel apparently purchased his share in 1867, when he joined the excursion; and Arthur, although not listed explicitly as an owner, was the ship’s “husband and agent” and “had the entire management of employing all the crew, furnishing all supplies and making all contracts, and receiving all the earnings of the said ship.” Daniel’s efforts during the trip failed to sell the vessel, evidently leaving them in financial difficulties. On 18 February 1868, a New York correspondent of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported that the “Quaker City steamship pleasure excursion ... has come to a disreputable finale. It appears that neither the seamen, nor the parties who furnished the supplies, were paid by the enterprising manager of the excursion, and so the steamer was seized, and on Saturday was knocked off at auction by the U.S. Marshal. The seamen’s claims for wages amount to $9,000.” The 15 February auction brought a mere $18,000, part of which went to meet the $9,000 claim for wages, and part to cover two claims for supplies totaling $1,145. Nothing more is known about the “$1,100 loaned to Dan. Leary” by fellow passenger Thomas B. Nesbit from Fulton, Missouri. At the request of several other part owners of the ship, and after Arthur Leary assured a United States District Court judge that “all claims against said ship and owners were arranged for and would be duly paid,” this sale was set aside. The ship was reauctioned on 11 April, bringing $40,000 this time—still a disappointment, since the Learys originally hoped to get $250,000 for it (Wilson 1867, 599; Heyl, 355–56; New York Herald: “Yesterday morning ...,” 16 Feb 68, 6; “The Steamship Quaker City—Order to Stay Proceedings of Sale,” 19 Feb 68, 5; “Letter from New York,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 17 Mar 68, 1; “Home News,” New York Tribune, 13 Apr 68, 8).
At the start of the voyage, Daniel Leary wrote his brother Arthur in a way that suggests why Clemens found him possessed of “generous instincts.” Leary complained that
the captain is a psalm singer and so are quite a number of others on board and they managed to get up quite a “revival” among themselves. They commenced with services once on Sunday, and finally we had it every evening and twice on Sunday, which did not suit myself or about a dozen other of the best people on board. (Leary to Arthur Leary, 1 July 67, transcript, CU-MARK, in Leary, 199)
At this time Clemens was writing roughly two letters per week: one to the Alta and one to the Enterprise. The revision in this sentence suggests that he was paid about thirty dollars apiece for them.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14219)
L2 , 133–136; MTMF , 6–9.
see Huntington Library, p. 512.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.