19 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 01301)
P. S. Your
P. S. Too many
stamps sent to me.
I comply with the autographic request with great pleasure, offering an adage which I some years ago tried to ring in on the late Franklin but without success.1explanatory note
Mrs. Clemens thanks you for the pleasant message, & offers her kindest remembrances, together with the wish that we may see you under our roof some day.2explanatory note
“‘Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well.’—B. F.” This was Clemens’s epigraph to “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” part of his “Memoranda” in the Galaxy magazine for July 1870, and in September 1875 published in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (SLC 1870; SLC 1875c). Stillson may have sent Clemens a copy of the sketches volume to autograph, along with too much return postage.
Formerly on the staff of the New York World, Stillson was now in the real estate business in Denver (23 Mar 1874 to Stillson, L6 , 86 n. 1).
References
- Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Conn.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 8 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “The Late Benjamin Franklin.” Galaxy 10 (July): 138–40. Reprinted in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (SLC 1875 [bib11536]), 275–78, and in Budd 1992a [bib00146], 425–27. 1870
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old. Hartford: American Publishing Company. 1875
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
MS, Cyril Clemens Collection, CtHMTH.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
Donated to CtHMTH in 1984 by Cyril Clemens.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.