14 February 1877
Sir:I see by your report of a lecture delivered in your neighborhood very recently, that a bit of my private personal history has been revealed to the public. The lecturer was head-waiter of the Quaker City Excursion of ten years ago. I do not repeat his name for the reason that I think he wants a little notoriety as a basis for introduction to the lecture platform, & I don’t wish to contribute. I harbor this suspicion because he calls himself “captain” of that expedition....
The “captain” says that when I came to engage passage in the Quaker City I “seemed to be full of whiskey, or something,” & filled his office with the “fumes of bad whiskey.” I hope this is true, but I cannot say, because it is so long ago; at the same time I am not depraved enough to deny that for a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year public advocate of total abstinence the “captain” is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second-hand....
Certain of my friends in New York have been so distressed by the “captain’s” charges against me that they have simply forced me to come out in print. But I find myself in a great difficulty by reason of the fact that I don’t find anything in the charges that discomforts me. Why should I worry over the “bad whiskey?” I was poor—I couldn’t afford good whiskey. How could I know that the “captain” was so particular about the quality of a man’s liquor? I didn’t know he was a purist in that matter, & that the difference between 5-cent & 40-cent toddy would remain a rankling memory with him for ten years....
Mark Twain
