But thunder, I mustn’t sit here writing all day, with so much business before me.

Good by, and kind regards to all. 
                         Yrs affy
                                   Sam L. Clemens.

     Jack Van Nostrand of this letter is “Jack” of the Innocents.  Emma
     Beach was the daughter of Moses S. Beach, of the ‘New York Sun.’ 
     Later she became the wife of the well-known painter, Abbot H.
     Thayer.

We do not hear of Miss Langdon again in the letters of that time, but it was not because she was absent from his thoughts.  He had first seen her with her father and brother at the old St. Nicholas Hotel, on lower Broadway, where, soon after the arrival of the Quaker City in New York, he had been invited to dine.  Long afterward he said:  “It is forty years ago; from that day to this she has never been out of my mind.”

From his next letter we learn of the lecture which apparently was
delivered in Washington.

To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis: 

Wash.  Jan. 9, 1868.  My dear mother and sister,—­That infernal lecture is over, thank Heaven!  It came near being a villainous failure.  It was not advertised at all.  The manager was taken sick yesterday, and the man who was sent to tell me, never got to me till afternoon today.  There was the dickens to pay.  It was too late to do anything—­too late to stop the lecture.  I scared up a door-keeper, and was ready at the proper time, and by pure good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved!  I hardly knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.  I was to have preached again Saturday night, but I won’t—­I can’t get along without a manager.

I have been in New York ever since Christmas, you know, and now I shall have to work like sin to catch up my correspondence.

And I have got to get up that book, too.  Cut my letters out of the Alta’s and send them to me in an envelop.  Some, here, that are not mailed yet, I shall have to copy, I suppose.

I have got a thousand things to do, and am not doing any of them.  I feel
perfectly savage. 
                         Good bye
                                   Yrs aff
          
                                   Sam.

On the whole, matters were going well with him.  His next letter is
full of his success—­overflowing with the boyish radiance which he
never quite outgrew.

To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis: 

Hartford, Conn.  Jan. 24-68.  Dear mother and sister,—­This is a good week for me.  I stopped in the Herald office as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and (write) about anybody and everybody I wanted to.  I said I must have the very fullest possible swing, and he said “all right.”  I said “It’s a contract—­” and that settled that matter.