30 January 1868 • Washington, D.C. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00186)
P.S.—I confess, humbly, that I deserve all you have said, & promise Ⓐemendationthat I will rigidly eschew slang & vulgarity in future, even in foolish dinner speeches, when on my guard.1explanatory note
And now, won’t you cut out s & send to me all your printed letters,2explanatory note for I need notes very badly to write from. My book is to make about 600 pages, & I find that my published letters, even copiously illustrated, will only make 250 pages.3explanatory note I am afraid that to write 5 or 6 newspapers letters a week & a book beside, is going to be more than I can do.
As Clemens predicted on 24 January, Mrs. Fairbanks had since seen and criticized his “verbatimly” reported response to the toast to “Woman” delivered at the Newspaper Correspondents’ Club dinner on 11 January. Neither her letter, which awaited him on his return to Washington, nor the body of his, to which this postscript presumably belonged, has been found.
Mrs. Fairbanks’s Quaker City letters to the Cleveland Herald; see 24 Jan 68 to Fairbanks, n. 4click to open link.
By 26 January, the Alta had published thirty-six Quaker City letters, and Clemens had received clippings of fewer than that.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14220). Clemens gave this single MS leaf its own dateline and labeled it a postscript, probably to a now-lost letter to Fairbanks. A less likely possibility is that he intended it as a delayed addendum to his 24 January letter to Fairbanksclick to open link, separately mailed six days later.
L2 , 170–171; MTMF , 16–17.
see Huntington Library, p. 512.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.