22 July 1870 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: MWC, UCCL 00491)
bituminous coal office no. 6 baldwin street
Dear Sir:
I can’t possibly do it. Nothing would give me greater pleasure if I were still in the field, but I trust & believe I have permanently quiet quit Ⓐemendation all manner of lecturing & public speaking. With many thanks & many regrets—
Possibly Charles Artemas King (1851–1917), who lived in Binghamton, New York, as a young man and later worked in the New York City Customs Department. It is somewhat more certain that Clemens’s correspondent was at least the C. A. King who compiled “Mark Twain: Excerpts from Magazines,” a collection of photographs of Mark Twain and clippings of articles by and about him, now in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia (“Charles A. King,” “Died,” New York Times, 25 July 1917, 11; NUC , 296:290).
MS, Special Collections, Robert Hutchings Goddard Library, Clark University, Worcester, Mass. (MWC). About five-eighths of an inch has been cut away from the bottom of the MS page below the signature and paraph. Opening and closing quotation marks and the top of a ‘T’ remain. The cut off portion probably read ‘ “Mark Twain” ’ and was almost certainly not in the author’s hand.
L4 , 174.