to drink her health right cordially,
for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored
the very best one of them all--his own mother! [Applause.]

APPENDIX H

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR LECTURE OF JULY 2, 1868

(See Chapter lxvi)

THE PUBLIC TO MARK TWAIN--CORRESPONDENCE

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Hearing that you are about to sail for New
York in the P. M. S. S. Company's steamer of the 6th July, to publish a
book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a
chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method
of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. We beg and implore
you do not. There is a limit to human endurance.

We are your personal friends. We have your welfare at heart. We desire
to see you prosper. And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only,
that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. Yours
truly,

60 names including: Bret Harte, Maj.-Gen. Ord, Maj.-Gen. Halleck,
The Orphan Asylum, and various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
Foot and Horseback, and 1500 in the Steerage.
(REPLY)

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th

TO THE 1,500 AND OTHERS,--It seems to me that your course is entirely
unprecedented. Heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other
frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the
very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on
for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the
public, but as soon as I want to take a farewell benefit you come after
me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen,
praying me not to do it. But it isn't of any use. You cannot move me
from my fell purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a
better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come
here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they
can't stand it what do they stay here for? Am I to go away and let them
have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only
lecture them twice? What do you take me for?

No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and I will do it cheerfully; but
do not ask me not to afflict the people. I wish to tell them all I know
about VENICE. I wish to tell them about the City of the Sea--that most
venerable, most brilliant, and proudest Republic the world has ever