As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the unseen—who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed.
XXI. SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE
He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea—a literary idea—came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the Post—for, a consideration. He may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each—good payment for that time and place. The young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis according to his first letter in the Post.—[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]
This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve.
I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto
the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up
into tickets—one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,
but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line
was left out—and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to
the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and
shakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and
“guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich
books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use
to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet
quit ringing her bell, and started down the river—but she hadn't
gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar
she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin'
—and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they
got her off.
This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on his hands.
From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return.
He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association—one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot.
He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly unlike him—without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.