1 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: MBAt, UCCL 07285)
I am sorry indeed that I did not see you, & glad, at the same time that you did not make the long trip out to my house & then fail, as—a thing apt to occur because folks are apt to come in the daytime & I don’t let anybody in, then! But I’m a sociable creature at night when work is done.
But work is piled on me in toppling pyramids, now—which figure represents a book which I am not getting out as fast as I ought—& I am obliged to say that I could not take half a column more on any terms. I would like exceedingly well to write for the Gazette (the only Weekly paper I ever wanted to own,) but as we steamboatmen used to say, “I’ve got my load.”1explanatory note
Warren Luther Brigham (1846–80) apparently began his journalistic career in 1867 with the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, moved to the Boston Advertiser in 1868, then to the Boston Courier in the summer of 1870, and was again with the Gazette when he wrote Clemens in November. The Gazette, founded in 1814, was “an excellent paper of its kind, with its theatrical and other reviews, its amusing tales, its humor, and its ‘lighter gossip of Boston life’” and its penchant for “racy western material” (Mott 1938, 35, 121; Lisa Backman, personal communication; Boston Directory: 1870, 111; 1871, 115).
MS, Boston Athenaeum, Boston (MBAt).
L4 , 254–255.
donated to MBAt on 5 March 1982 by Dorothy Webling (Mrs. Benjamin T.) Stephenson, Brigham’s granddaughter.