[Boston, 9 November 1869] MY DEAR SISTER [Pamela Moffett], --

. . . 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. I have 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 22nd 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.

[from Mark Twain's Letters, ed. A. B. Paine, pp. 168-69]