§ 133. Closed Out
30–31 January 1866
This sketch was included in Clemens' “San Francisco Letter” to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise written on 28 January 1866. It seems likely that it appeared in that paper two or three days later. A clipping of the entire letter is preserved in the Yale Scrapbook.1
Clemens here returned to a technique he had often used in Nevada: the imputation of a ravenously destructive appetite to his comic enemy. The Unreliable is given this trait, for example, in “Letter from Carson City,” “Letter from Carson,” and “The Unreliable” (nos. 40, 42, and 46). Clemens' immediate purpose, however, was to turn the tables on Albert Evans, who had accused him of stripping San Francisco of “all the available material” that Adair Wilson had planned to use for writing a book to be called “The Free Lunch Table.”2
The fine restaurant between Clay and Commercial, on Montgomery street, has been sold at auction. It was fitted up three months ago at a cost of thirty-six hundred dollars, and brought only fourteen hundred yesterday under the hammer. At first it did a prosperous business—made money fast. Everybody was glad of it, for the proprietor was an estimable man, and was struggling to gather together by honest industry a small independence, so that he might go back to the Fatherland of his daily dreams, and clasp once more to his breast the wife who has waited and watched for him through weary years, kiss once more his little ones, and hear their innocent prattle, and their childish glee, and the music of their restless little feet. But about that time Fitz Smythe went there to board, and that let him out, you know. But such is human life. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. A dream—a shadow—a ripple on the water—a thing for invisible gods to sport with for a season and then toss idly by—idly by. It is rough.
The first printing appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably on 30 or 31 January 1866. The only known copy of this printing, in a clipping in the Yale Scrapbook (pp. 36A-37), is copy-text. Mark Twain struck through the entire clipping while selecting material for JF1 in January or February 1867. There are no textual notes or emendations.