7 October 1868 • (MS: CLjC, UCCL 02757)
I am here, getting out a book. I saw your father & mother & Gerty often in New York—& also Mr. Brown of the Legation. We all concocted a Treaty article together, for the N. Y. Tribune.1explanatory note
Do you remember your Honolulu joke?—“If a man compel thee to go with him a mile, go with him, Twain.” I have closed many & many a lecture, in many a city, with that. It always “fetches” them.2explanatory note I w Send me your picture—I enclose mine.3explanatory note
docketed in pencil by Burlingame on back of letter: S.S. Clemens, | Hartford, | Oct. 7, ’68 | flourish
Clemens himself had been recently “fetched” by Burlingame’s joke. After Clemens’s second lecture in Virginia City, the Territorial Enterprise reported that he
was yesterday made the recipient at the hands of Mr. Conrad Wiegand, the well known assayer, of a very beautiful and highly-polished silver brick, worth some $40. The brick bears the following inscription: “Mark Twain—Matthew, V: 41—Pilgrim.” All our readers will recollect at once that the verse referred to reads as follows: “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” Twain would never object to going even farther, if sure of getting a fellow to the bar presented him by Mr. Wiegand, and provided he was furnished a seat in a good, easy-going and softly-cushioned carriage. (“A Neat and Appropriate Present,” 29 Apr 1868, 3)
Eventually, however, Clemens grew tired of the joke, saying in 1906:
When it was new, it seemed exceedingly happy and bright, but it has been emptied upon me upwards of several million times since—never by a witty and engaging lad like Burlingame, but always by chuckle-heads of base degree, who did it with offensive eagerness and with the conviction that they were the first in the field. (AD, 20 Feb 1906click to open letter, AutoMT1)
The enclosure has not been found, but it was probably a small, carte de visite print of the Bradley and Rulofson photograph recently made in San Francisco, rather than an “imperial-size” print of the one taken in Cleveland (see 1 and 5 May 1868click to open letter, n. 7, and 24 Sept 1868click to open letter, n. 3, both to Fairbanks).
MS, CLjC.
Sotheby’s, 29 October 1996, lot 250; Remember When Auctions, 7 October 1995, no. 37, lot 775, partial publication; Swann Galleries, 14 September 1993, no. 1633, lot 359, partial publication; L2, 261; possibly extracted in a 1968 issue of The Collector: A Magazine for Autograph and Historical Collectors, published by Walter R. Benjamin, Autographs, New York (now Hunter), N.Y., although its appearance there has not been verified; Clemens 1932, 18.
Cyril Clemens saw and transcribed the MS sometime before 1932. Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs bought it from the Seven Gables Bookshop in 1974. Swann Galleries listed it for sale in 1993; Remember When Auctions listed it in 1995. The Jacobses finally sold it through Sotheby’s in October 1996; it was then or soon thereafter bought by the Copley Library (CLjC). The whole of CLjC was in turn sold in May 2011, and the location of this letter is not now known.