1 The telegram has not been recovered. In early July, while Clemens was in Hartford, Olivia had sent her letters to the Courant office, evidently confusing the postman (3 July 74 to OLC, n. 1).

2 Clemens and his Hartford friends and neighbors had been following the “Beecher scandal” since 1872, when the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was first publicly accused of committing adultery with a parishioner, Elizabeth Tilton (see L5, 231 n. 3, 235–38). During the summer of 1874 the allegation was under investigation by a committee of Beecher’s Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn, New York. Progress was reported on a daily basis by newspapers across the United States, including at least two of Clemens’s local papers, the Hartford Courant, which was forwarded to him in Elmira, and the Elmira Advertiser. The event Clemens alluded to was the 28 July arrest, and release on his own recognizance, of Theodore Tilton, husband of Elizabeth, on charges of libeling Beecher in an article in the Brooklyn Eagle of 20 July, which provided details of the alleged adultery. Clemens assumed that Beecher had caused Tilton’s arrest, while others believed that Tilton or his friends had engineered it to get the matter into the courts. In fact, as was reported in the first accounts on 29 July, the arrest was the result of a libel suit brought independently by William J. Gaynor, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer. Gaynor, who had a checkered past working for collection agencies, was on the staff of another Brooklyn paper, the Argus, but claimed to be acting out of public spirit. The suit never came to trial. On 1 August the newspapers reported that it would be dismissed, and four days later it was. Clemens must have written the present letter early in the course of these events, probably on 29 July. The Beecher-Tilton scandal truly became a national obsession in August when Tilton sued Beecher for alienation of affections. Clemens and Twichell closely followed the resultant trial, which culminated in July 1875 with a hung jury voting nine to three for Beecher’s innocence (see 1 Feb 75 to Stoddard and pp. 446, 448). In February 1876, Twichell was a delegate to an advisory council of Congregational ministers convened by Plymouth Church, which reviewed the matter and exonerated Beecher (Elmira Advertiser: “It Has Come!” 29 July 74, 1; “Tilton-Beecher,” 30 July 74, 1; “Tilton’s Trial,” 30 July 74, 2; “The Beecher Scandal,” 1 Aug 74, 1; “The Brooklyn Argus . . .,” 1 Aug 74, 2; Hartford Courant: “It is evident . . .,” 29 July 74, 2; “Tilton’s Last Move,” 29 July 74, 3; “The Tilton-Beecher Scandal,” 30 July 74, 3; “The Tilton-Beecher Scandal,” 4 Aug 74, 3; “The Scandal,” 6 Aug 74, 3; New York Times: “The Scandal Not Settled,” 3 July 75, 1; MTB, 1:544–45; Andrews, 35–41; Twichell, 2:4–5, 20–21, 27–36).