I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick.  He ought to go to the country and take exercise; for he is not half so healthy as Ma thinks he is.  If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely.  Four times every day I walk a little over one mile; and working hard all day, and walking four miles, is exercise—­I am used to it, now, though, and it is no trouble.  Where is it Orion’s going to?  Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept, and if I have my health I will take her to Ky. in the spring—­I shall save money for this.  Tell Jim and all the rest of them to write, and give me all the news.  I am sorry to hear such bad news from Will and Captain Bowen.  I shall write to Will soon.  The Chatham-square Post Office and the Broadway office too, are out of my way, and I always go to the General Post Office; so you must write the direction of my letters plain, “New York City, N. Y.,” without giving the street or anything of the kind, or they may go to some of the other offices. (It has just struck 2 A.M. and I always get up at 6, and am at work at 7.) You ask me where I spend my evenings.  Where would you suppose, with a free printers’ library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?  I shall write to Ella soon.  Write soon
                         Truly your Brother
          
                                   Sam.

P. S. I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not read by it.

     He was lodging in a mechanics’ cheap boarding-house in Duane Street,
     and we may imagine the bareness of his room, the feeble poverty of
     his lamp.

“Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept.”  It was the day when he had left Hannibal.  His mother, Jane Clemens, a resolute, wiry woman of forty-nine, had put together his few belongings.  Then, holding up a little Testament: 

“I want you to take hold of the end of this, Sam,” she said, “and make me a promise.  I want you to repeat after me these words:  ’I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card, or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone.’”

It was this oath, repeated after her, that he was keeping faithfully.  The Will Bowen mentioned is a former playmate, one of Tom Sawyer’s outlaw band.  He had gone on the river to learn piloting with an elder brother, the “Captain.”  What the bad news was is no longer remembered, but it could not have been very serious, for the Bowen boys remained on the river for many years.  “Ella” was Samuel Clemens’s cousin and one-time sweetheart, Ella Creel.  “Jim” was Jim Wolfe, an apprentice in Orion’s office, and the hero of an adventure which long after Mark Twain wrote under the title of, “Jim Wolfe and the Cats.”

There is scarcely a hint of the future Mark Twain in this early letter.  It is the letter of a boy of seventeen who is beginning to