1 Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK), which replied to his of 1 February:

In a 1906 account of his accident, Stoddard explained that his irresponsible Italian guide had provided a horse that later proved to be blind, with “eyes like a couple of hard-boiled eggs” (Charles Warren Stoddard 1906, 493). George Dolby was Clemens’s English lecture agent. The book on England had stopped “growing” in early 1874, when Clemens used portions of the unfinished manuscript in Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One (see 25 Feb 74 to Fairbanks, n. 6). For additional glosses of Stoddard’s allusions, see notes 4 and 5.

2 Clemens’s maternal aunt, Martha Ann Lampton (1807–50), married John Adams Quarles (1802–76), and they had eight children who survived infancy, born between 1826 and 1844. Clemens spent his boyhood summers on the Quarles farm in Florida, Missouri, with these cousins, who delighted in playing pranks (Lampton 1990, 57; MTB, 1:10–12, 30–34).

3 Francis Dalzell Finlay, proprietor of the Belfast Northern Whig, had met Stoddard while staying in London as Clemens’s guest in December 1873 (L5, 529).

4 John Paul’s Book. The sense of triumph in Clemens’s remark is attributable to an old conflict with Webb that still rankled (see 8 Apr 75 to Webb, n. 1).

5 Prentice Mulford and Joaquin Miller both lived for a time in a lodging house at 11 Museum Street in London, where Stoddard also stayed while Miller was in Rome. On 3 November 1873 Miller wrote Stoddard about Josie Allen, another Museum Street lodger: “I am glad you like Miss Allen. . . . She is a little thing that I am trying to bring up to the light of the sun and I hope not altogether for selfish purposes. I need not tell you she has been unfortunate; hence, as a Christian knight you will treat her the more gently” (CSmH, in Walker 1969, 342). Olive Harper (1842–1915), a California journalist, novelist, and poet, described Allen in one of her 1873 European travel letters for the San Francisco Alta California:

Mulford and Allen married in the spring of 1874, and in July of that year returned to America, evidently settling in Sag Harbor, New York, his native town. The marriage did not last: reportedly they separated when Mulford refused “to let his pretty wife continue posing in the nude for commercial artists, a practice which he discovered when he received a picture of her naked figure in a package of cheap cigarettes” (Walker 1969, 341–42, 346–48, 355; Charles Warren Stoddard 1905, 97–99; Marberry, 120–22; Mulford 1874 [bib13758], 1874 [bib13759]). See also Stoddard’s amusing sketch about his stay at 11 Museum Street and his own relationship with Allen: Charles Warren Stoddard 1903, 277–320.