I enclose $25 draft for $25 on Hartford. I shall be sincerely glad to hear that your success meets your highest expectations. But I want to caution you earnestly as to one thing. When reporters or anybody el come to interview you, s while on your travels, & shall chance to inquire about me, or my f affairs,—then say to these folks, “There, let us draw the line there,—I have not one single word of any sort to say about Sam or Sam’s matters.” I want you to be steadfast to that, & never depart from it. I cannot abide those newspaper references to me & my matters. I think that one reason why I have ceased to write to friends & relatives is that I can’t trust them. Mother Fairbanks, Mollie Fairbanks, you, & other close friends, have printed stuff from my private letters, & I have never had the courage to say “Respect my privacy,” but have taken refuge in writing ten-line letters with nothing in the ten lines. I don’t think Ma & Pamela have put me into print since I was in Nevada, so I merely don’t write to them because of the long habit of not writing—not because I can’t trust them. But you see, if you’re going to travel I’ve got to speak out & protest against being made a text for reporters & Raymonds & Cutters Bloodgood Cutters.

I will now write to Perkins to increase your monthly check $8 for the present, & make it $50. I think you will continue in “abject poverty” as long as you keep boarders and lodgers. You two could go & board & lodge quite comfortably with somebody else for $30 or $35 a month. Then why don’t you do it? Why do you want to slave so, to make both ends meet? Anybody can be as poor as he wants to, who will persist in living as he has no business to live. Anybody can be poor who won’t live within his income. There is no place in America, big or little, where man & wife can’t get bed & fire & plenty to eat for $35 a month. There is no place in the whole world where this cannot be done. You have no right to pay any more than that. Of course you can’t have a church pew & other idiotic vanities thrown in, but you can be comfortable, & that is something. I wish you would try this thing once. I think you & Mollie would find that the absence of persecuting anxieties & scrimpings would compensate for the loss of any grandeurs which your present way of life confers upon you. There is no place where a kitchen & a parlor & a chamber cannot be rented for $8 a month—therefore why not keep house alone; half the slaving which you & Mollie do now would enable you to keep house without a servant. There would be nothing disreputable about it. Your own mother has cooked, & so has Mollie’s.

I am not in an ill humor; I am not snarling; I am onl not proposing what I would not propose to myself—that is, live clear within my income, whether it was a thousand dollars a week or fifteen.

All are well, & all send love & best wishes.