helped.  She must wait awhile, till I am firmly on my legs, & then she shall see you.  She says her father and mother will invite you just as soon as the wedding date is definitely fixed, anyway—­& she thinks that’s bound to settle it.  But the ice & snow, & the long hard journey, & the injudiciousness of laying out any money except what we are obliged to part with while we are so much in debt, settles the case differently.  For it is a debt.

.....Mr. Langdon is just as good as bound for $25,000 for me, and has
already advanced half of it in cash.   I wrote and asked whether I had
better send him my note, or a due-bill, or how he would prefer to have
the indebtedness made of record and he answered every other topic in the
letter pleasantly but never replied to that at all.   Still, I shall give
my note into the hands of his business agent here, and pay him the
interest as it falls due.   We must “go slow.”   We are not in the
Cleveland Herald.   We are a hundred thousand times better off, but there
isn’t so much money in it.

(Remainder missing.)

In spite of the immediate success of his book—­a success the like of which had scarcely been known in America-Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a journalist:  He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the rest of his life to journalism.  The paper was the Buffalo Express; his interest in it was one-third—­the purchase price, twenty-five thousand dollars, of which he had paid a part, Jervis Langdon, his future father-in-law, having furnished cash and security for the remainder.  He was already in possession in August, but he was not regularly in Buffalo that autumn, for he had agreed with Redpath to deliver his Quaker City lecture, and the tour would not end until a short time before his wedding-day, February 2, 1870.

Our next letter hardly belongs in this collection; as it was doubtless written with at least the possibility of publication in view.  But it is too amusing, too characteristic of Mark Twain, to be omitted.  It was sent in response to an invitation from the New York Society of California Pioneers to attend a banquet given in New York City, October 13, 1869, and was, of course, read to the assembled diners.

    To the New York Society of California Pioneers, in New York City: 

Elmira, October 11, 1869.  Gentlemen,—­Circumstances render it out of my power to take advantage of the invitation extended to me through Mr. Simonton, and be present at your dinner at New York.  I regret this very much, for there are several among you whom I would have a right to join hands with on the score of old friendship, and I suppose I would have a sublime general right to shake hands with the rest of you on the score of kinship in California ups and downs in search of fortune.