I don’t seem to find the place; but anyway she was as sorry as ever anybody could be that I could not go to Bridgeport, but there was no help for it.  And I, I have been not only sorry but very sincerely ashamed of having made an engagement to go without first making sure that I could keep it, and I do not know how to apologize enough for my heedless breach of good manners. 
                    With the sincerest respect,
                                        S. L. Clemens.

Samuel Clemens was one of the very few authors to copyright a book in England before the enactment of the international copyright law.  As early as 1872 he copyrighted ‘Roughing It’ in England, and piratical publishers there respected his rights.  Finally, in 1887, the inland revenue office assessed him with income tax, which he very willingly paid, instructing his London publishers, Chatto & Windus, to pay on the full amount he had received from them.  But when the receipt for his taxes came it was nearly a yard square with due postage of considerable amount.  Then he wrote: 

To Mr. Chatto, of Chatto & Windus, in London: 

Hartford, Dec. 5, ’87.  My dear Chatto,—­Look here, I don’t mind paying the tax, but don’t you let the Inland Revenue Office send me any more receipts for it, for the postage is something perfectly demoralizing.  If they feel obliged to print a receipt on a horse-blanket, why don’t they hire a ship and send it over at their own expense?

Wasn’t it good that they caught me out with an old book instead of a new one?  The tax on a new book would bankrupt a body.  It was my purpose to go to England next May and stay the rest of the year, but I’ve found that tax office out just in time.  My new book would issue in March, and they would tax the sale in both countries.  Come, we must get up a compromise somehow.  You go and work in on the good side of those revenue people and get them to take the profits and give me the tax.  Then I will come over and we will divide the swag and have a good time.

I wish you to thank Mr. Christmas for me; but we won’t resist.  The
country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me. 
                              Sincerely Yours
                                        S. L. Clemens.

Another English tax assessment came that year, based on the report that it was understood that he was going to become an English resident, and had leased Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year.  Clemens wrote his publishers:  “I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper’s mistake.  I was not in England, and if I had been I wouldn’t have been at Buckenham Hall, anyway, but at Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to find out the reason why.”  Clemens made literature out of this tax experience.  He wrote an open letter to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.  Such