1 Clemens replied to Fairbanks’s letter of 28 February (see the next note). The photographs Fairbanks enclosed have not been found. Her letter was post-marked in Cleveland on 29 February; Clemens probably received and answered it within a day or two of that date.

2 Fairbanks’s forgiveness was contained in her letter of 28 February (CU-MARK), a response to Clemens’s 13 February letter. The delay in responding may have been caused, in part, by the death of her father-in-law, Zabad Fairbanks (b. 1790), on 12 February at Fair Banks (Cleveland Herald: “Death of Mr. Z. Fairbanks,” 13 Feb 72, 2; “Funeral of Mr. Z. Fairbanks,” 14 Feb 72, 4; Fairbanks, 318). The tone of her remarks was more reproachful than magnanimous:

In addition to her teen-aged son and daughter, Charles Mason and Mary Paine (Mollie), Fairbanks mentioned her stepdaughter, Alice (Allie) Fairbanks Gaylord; her son-in-law, William H. Gaylord; her stepson, Frank Fairbanks, a partner in his father’s Cleveland Herald, who had married the former Mary Walker in November, and was apparently living at Cleveland’s Weddell House; and Eliza P. (Mrs. Timothy D.) Crocker, one of the Quaker City passengers, who had written to Clemens on 6 February 1871 soliciting a contribution for a monthly paper, the Velocipede, printed by her sixteen-year-old son, Otis D. Crocker (CU-MARK). Also mentioned: the Cleveland visit of Grand Duke Alexis Aleksandrovich on 26–28 December 1871 (see 5 Dec 72 to the editor of the Hartford Evening Post, n. 6); Amasa Stone, Jr. (1818–83), wealthy Cleveland banker and builder, and future father-in-law of John Hay; W. T. Machin, identified by the newspapers as the Russian councillor of state; Frederick W. Pelton, mayor of Cleveland in 1871 and 1872; Bloodgood Haviland Cutter, the “Poet Lariat” of The Innocents Abroad, who, with other Quaker City passengers, visited Tsar Aleksandr II in Yalta in August 1867, and left his “bombazine coat,” stuffed with poems, at the palace (Frederick W. Davis to SLC, 25 Apr 1906, CU-MARK); and two often-recited poems, “Casabianca” by Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835) and “Hohenlinden” by Thomas Campbell (1777–1844). Jephthah’s history is told in Judges 11 and 12; the last clause of Acts 16:37 reads, “but let them come themselves and fetch us out” (L2, 80–85, 132 n. 10, 134–35 n. 2, 311 n. 10; L3, 187 n. 5; L4, 302 n. 1; Fairbanks, 552, 754–55; Cleveland Directory, 162, 403; Rose, 183, 208–9, 261, 275, 303, 381, 407; Cleveland Herald: “The Grand Duke Alexis,” 27 Dec 71 and 28 Dec 71, 4).

3 Clemens may have misdirected his letter. Charles Fairbanks, who would turn seventeen on 27 March, was probably attending Western Reserve Academy, a preparatory school associated with Western Reserve College, in Hudson, Ohio, about twenty miles southeast of Cleveland. Clemens docketed the envelope of Fairbanks’s letter, “Ch. Fairbanks Nast.,” indicating that he intended to write to Thomas Nast on Charles’s behalf (CU-MARK; 10 Dec 72 to Nast; Fairbanks, 755; Rose, 104, 386).