d sleepy--been in Congress all day and making
newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there
is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.

I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
of the Union--have declined them all. I am for business now.

Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am
offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write
Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
not interfere. Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.
Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
for no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making friends
than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue on
the Alta.
Yours affectionately,
SAM.

P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.

But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible to
conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the
secretary of Senator Stewart.

--[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and
after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the
truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he
(Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity. He adds that
Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a
thrashing was necessary. The reason for such statements becomes
apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses
him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and
claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements,
save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable
offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for
himself.]

Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of "My Late
Senatorial Secretaryship," "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,"
etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the
change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York
Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.

There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens