er 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:

"If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about
me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years old who is not
able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother
is not worth one's thoughts."

Sam Clemens may have followed Forrest to Philadelphia. At any rate, he
was there presently, "subbing" in the composing-room