June 16 Wednesday — In Redding, Conn. Sam wrote to William Robertson Coe.
Dear Mr. Coe: / I was glad to hear from you, & I wish you had come yourself, & brought your letter & Mrs. Mai. I am in the doctor’s hands, as a foreguessed result of the Baltimore trip, which was a hard one for an old person, for it was cold & rainy; but the engagement was five months old & had to be kept.
Perhaps it might inflame Lancaster’s feelings still more to know that I wrote a part of the Eulogy three years ago & Mr. Rogers would not let me publish it; that I finished it a year later; was not satisfied with that finish, & destroyed it; re-framed it once more, two days after Mr. Rogers’s funeral, & again destroyed the product; that it will never be published until it is worded to suit me, if I have to wait seven years, The most of my books have had to wait several years until I could finish them to suit me. Whenever I have had anything of real importance to do, these waits have always occurred. I suppose Mr. Lancaster can sit down & knock off a Eulogy in an hour—any hour, any day—without any difficulty. But I am not built in that way. I was never in a hurry yet, on a piece of work that I wanted to do well. Eulogy? In the 6 unpublished volumes of my Autobiography Mr. Rogers is pervasive; the references to him & to his goodness, his greatness, his nobility, his charm, are scattered all through those books, & they are his best Eulogy—affectionate, grateful, spontaneous, unaffected; & they will still be read, & in them his kindly face & his lovable nature will still shine, a hundred years after all the hasty Eulogies of to-day shall have been forgotten.
Mr. Ashcroft & Miss Lyon are still being investigated, but the finish is near. Mr. Rogers began the investigation for me. I wish he could have had the happiness of seeing a paper which we heard of by accident on the 29th of May, & hunted to cover in New York banks. The most amazing document that has seen the light since the Middle Ages. It bears date Nov. 14 last, & is a General Power of Attorney which hands me & all I own & all I ever shall own, over to Ashcroft & Miss Lyon. Until June 1 I had never heard of that paper—yet I signed it. Come—match me this mystery if you can / Sincerely / ... [MTP]. Note: see Nov. 14, 1908 entry and notes from Hill p, 212-13.
Sam also inscribed his photo (in his white suit and standing in a garden) to an unidentified person: “Truly yours / Mark Twain / June 16/09” [MTP].