“(It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at six and am at work at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings.  Where would you suppose, with a free printers’ library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?”

   “I shall write to Ella soon.  Write soon. 
   “Truly your Brother,

   “Samy.

   “P.S.—­I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could
   not read by it.”

We get a fair idea of Samuel Clemens at seventeen from this letter.  For one thing, he could write good, clear English, full of interesting facts.  He is enthusiastic, but not lavish of words.  He impresses us with his statement that the visitors to the Palace each day are in number double the population of Hannibal; a whole river is turned from its course to supply New York City with water; the water comes thirty-eight miles, and each family could use a hundred barrels a day!  The letter reveals his personal side—­his kindly interest in those left behind, his anxiety for Henry, his assurance that the promise to his mother was being kept, his memory of her longing to visit her old home.  And the boy who hated school has become a reader—­he is reveling in a printers’ library of thousands of volumes.  We feel, somehow, that Samuel Clemens has suddenly become quite a serious-minded person, that he has left Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper and Huck Finn somewhere in a beautiful country a long way behind.

He found work with the firm of John A. Gray & Green, general printers, in Cliff Street.  His pay was four dollars a week, in wild-cat money—­that is, money issued by private banks—­rather poor money, being generally at a discount and sometimes worth less.  But if wages were low, living was cheap in those days, and Sam Clemens, lodging in a mechanics’ boarding-house in Duane Street, sometimes had fifty cents left on Saturday night when his board and washing were paid.

Luckily, he had not set out to seek his fortune, but only to see something of the world.  He lingered in New York through the summer of 1853, never expecting to remain long.  His letters of that period were few.  In October he said, in a letter to Pamela, that he did not write to the family because he did not know their whereabouts, Orion having sold the paper and left Hannibal.

“I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York every day for the last two weeks,” he adds, which sounds like the Mark Twain of fifty years later.  Farther along, he tells of going to see Edwin Forrest, then playing at the Broadway Theater: 

“The play was the ‘Gladiator.’  I did not like part of it much, but other portions were really splendid.  In the latter part of the last act. . . the man’s whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is real startling to see him.  I am sorry I did not see him play ‘Damon and Pythias,’ the former character being the greatest.  He appears in Philadelphia on Monday night.”

A little farther along he says: