In the next place--Mr.Langdon is old, and is trying hard to withdraw from business and seek repose.I will not burden him with a purchase--but I will ask him to take full possession of a coal tract of the land without paying a cent, simply conditioning that he shall mine and throw the coal into market at his own cost, and pay to you and all of you what he thinks is a fair portion of the profits accruing--you can do as you please with the rest of the land.Therefore, send me (to Elmira,)information about the coal deposits so framed that he can comprehend the matter and can intelligently instruct an agent how to find it and go to work.
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future success in New England.But I am not distressed.Nasby is in the same boat.Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture.He has just left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed.Ihave convinced him that he has little to fear.
I get just about five hundred more applications to lecture than I can possibly fill--and in the West they say "Charge all you please, but come." I shan't go West at all.I stop lecturing the 22d of January, sure.But I shall talk every night up to that time.They flood me with high-priced invitations to write for magazines and papers, and publishers besiege me to write books.Can't do any of these things.
I am twenty-two thousand dollars in debt, and shall earn the money and pay it within two years--and therefore I am not spending any money except when it is necessary.
I had my life insured for $10,000 yesterday (what ever became of Mr.
Moffett' s life insurance?) "for the benefit of my natural heirs"--the same being my mother, for Livy wouldn't claim it, you may be sure of that.This has taken $200 out of my pocket which I was going to send to Ma.But I will send her some, soon.Tell Orion to keep a stiff upper lip--when the worst comes to the worst I will come forward.Must talk in Providence, R.I., tonight.Must leave now.I thank Mollie and Orion and the rest for your letters, but you see how I am pushed--ought to have 6 clerks.
Affectionately, SAM.
By the end of January, 1870 more than thirty thousand copies of the Innocents had been sold, and in a letter to his publisher the author expressed his satisfaction.
To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:
ELMIRA, Jan.28 '70.
FRIEND BLISS,--.....Yes, I am satisfied with the way you are running the book.You are running it in staving, tip-top, first-class style.Inever wander into any corner of the country but I find that an agent has been there before me, and many of that community have read the book.And on an average about ten people a day come and hunt me up to thank me and tell me I'm a benefactor! I guess this is a part of the programme we didn't expect in the first place.
I think you are rushing this book in a manner to be proud of; and you will make the finest success of it that has ever been made with a subscription book, I believe.What with advertising, establishing agencies, &c., you have got an enormous lot of machinery under way and hard at work in a wonderfully short space of time.It is easy to see, when one travels around, that one must be endowed with a deal of genuine generalship in order to maneuvre a publication whose line of battle stretches from end to end of a great continent, and whose foragers and skirmishers invest every hamlet and besiege every village hidden away in all the vast space between.
I'll back you against any publisher in America, Bliss--or elsewhere.
Yrs as ever CLEMENS.