San Francisco Alta California, June 2, 1867
BOUND EAST AGAIN
We came East in an express train this time. It had fewer inconvenient features about it than that gravel train we went West in. It had one important one, though. We never could get a complete meal. We could eat a few minutes at a time, very often, but there was not a great deal of satisfaction about that. About the time you get fairly to eating, they yell, "All aboard for Cleveland!" and you have to start. Brown said he ate eleven dollars' worth the first day and then got into the sleeping car hungry.
And there were the peddlers. I bought out the pop-corn boy to get rid of him, because I was trying to compose a poem for a young lady's album. But he came right back with a stock of peanuts. I took a few and hurried him away and he returned with some ice-cream candy. I do not like ice-cream candy and peanuts together, but I invested at once because a lucky rhyme had been born to me and I wanted to set it down before it slipped me. Then the scoundrel came back with tobacco and cigars, and afterwards with oranges, imitation ivory baby-whistles, fig-paste and apples, and then he went away and was gone some time, and I was encouraged to hope the train had run over him. Such was not the case. He was only keeping his most malignant out rage for the last. He was getting his literature ready. And from that time onward that degraded youth did nothing but march from one car to the other and afflict the passengers with specimen copies of the vilest blood and thunder romances on earth - "Lionel Warburton, or the Perjurer's Doom ;" "Godfrey de Langley, or the Carnival of Blood;" "One-Eyed Bill, or the Desperado's Revenge" - those were some of his mildest works; and on their backs were pictures of stabbing affrays, and duels, and people shoving other people down precipices, and wretched wood cuts of women being rescued from terrific perils of all possible kinds - and they were always women who were so disgracefully homely that any right-minded man would take a placid satisfaction in seeing them suffer a sudden and a violent death. But that peddler peddled those books right along for hours together, and I gave up my poem and devoted all my energies to driving him away and trying to say things that would make him unhappy.
PROGRESS AND PROSPERITY
Such wonderful cities as we saw, all the way through Ohio, New York and New Jersey. It seemed to me that every fifteen minutes we passed through a Sacramento, and every hour and a half through a San Francisco - and verily I believe we did. And they looked so flourishing, and so cheerful and handsomely built, and so fiercely busy. Ah, my boy, it is good to come to the States occasionally, and see what a great country it is. Now I always thought that Cleveland, and Columbus, and Newark, and Paterson, were only villages, and so do thousands of other people but they are great cities. And we passed through many a city like Sacramento that I had always imagined was little more than a blacksmith shop and a Post Office, and we saw any number of towns of 5,000 to 8,000 inhabitants that I honestly believe I had never heard of before. I was just in a condition of lively astonishment all through those three States. No wonder Englishmen make mistakes about America when we know so little about it ourselves.
And speaking of Cleveland reminds me that I saw flaming posters there announcing "Miss Lotta's Last Night !" A man who got on the cars there told me that Miss Lotta was the best actress that ever lived, and he didn't care a cent where the next one came from. Well, she is a California girl, and I hope she will make everybody think as that man did. I heard Lotta's acting well spoken of in St. Louis.
But isn't it funny that there are no drinking saloons in the depots? I have no recollection of seeing a solitary gin-mill in a depot-building from St. Louis to New York - a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came. At Cincinnati there were 250,000 people moderately drunk, but that was an accident. At a great fire, a large number of barrels of whiskey had been bursted open, and the stuff ran down to the river, got into an eddy, was pumped into the water-works and was distributed throughout the city in the form of weak whiskey punches. It was said that there was more water drank in Cincinnati that day than was ever drank there in one day before. It is likely.
PERSONAL
George Butler has been working hard at Washington to get the Consulship at Panama, but did not succeed because his uncle, Gen. Butler, is so unpopular at the White House. George said he worked all possible purchases, but they failed; he proved himself a good Democrat at the White House, and a good Radical at the Capitol, and became so expert in duplicity at last, and so admirably plausible that he couldn't tell, himself, when he was lying and when he wasn't. Somebody told him to keep up the dodge of pretending to belong to both parties - it was first rate Washington policy to carry water on both shoulders. George said as long as he only had to carry the water on his shoulders, he could stand it, but he was too good a Democrat to carry any in his stomach! Good, wasn't it? He said that at first he tried to buy off all candidates for the Consulship, but they came so fast he found it would break a mint to succeed in that way; next he tried moral suasion on them, and that failed; and finally he concluded to whip all the applicants that came, but he soon found that there were not hours enough in the day or days enough in the year for that. So the office has gone into other hands, and I am not the only man who is sorry George did not get it.
Maguire is here, and his Japs are playing in Philadelphia and Washington. Hingston is making great preparations for their reception in London, and says they will draw $1,500-houses every night for a good many weeks.
Webb ("Inigo") has fixed up a volume of my sketches, and he and the American News Company will publish it on Thursday, the 25th of the present month. He has gotten it up in elegant style, and has done everything to suit his own taste, which is excellent. I have made no suggestions. He calls it "THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG, AND OTHER SKETCHES, by 'Mark Twain.' Edited by C. H. Webb." Its price is $1.50 a copy. It will have a truly gorgeous gold frog on the back of it, and that frog alone will be worth the money. I don't know but what it would be well to publish the frog and leave the book out. Mail your orders either to C. H. Webb or the American News Company, New York.
As per order of the ALTA, just received by telegraph, I have taken passage in the great pleasure excursion to Europe, the Exposition and the Holy Land, and will sail on the 8th of June. You could not have suited me better. The ship is the Quaker City, and she is being sumptuously fitted up.