ress, a
majority of whose members are hopelessly insane? Probably not. But it is
possible--unquestionably such a thing is possible. Only I don't believe
it will happen in our time; and I am satisfied the capital will not be
moved until it does happen. But if St. Louis would donate the ground and
the buildings, it would be a different matter. No, Pamela, I don't see
any good reason to believe you or I will ever see the capital moved.

I have twice instructed the publishers to send you a book--it was the
first thing I did--long before the proofs were finished. Write me if it
is not yet done.

Livy says we must have you all at our marriage, and I say we can't. It
will be at Christmas or New Years, when such a trip across the country
would be equivalent to murder & arson & everything else.--And it would
cost five hundred dollars--an amount of money she don't know the value
of now, but will before a year is gone. She grieves over it, poor little
rascal, but it can't be 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