to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave
I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I
shall get off Tuesday, though.

Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the
Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The
play was the "Gladiator." I did not like parts of it much, but
other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last
act, where the "Gladiator" (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in
all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul
seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really 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.

I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a "Journal"
the other day, in which I see the office has been sold . . . .

If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about
me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is
not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a
brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take
care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid,
however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall
be) as "independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.". . .

Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the
Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than
that in the summer.

"I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New
York" is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty
years later.

He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work "subbing" on a daily
paper,'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set
ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of
work done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to
fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He
was still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he
returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner,
grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand
at writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some
reason he did not again attempt to get into the