1 Clemens did not finish drafting this book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, until July 1875.

2 Redpath’s response has not been found. Clemens’s work on what became “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic revived the idea of a book about the river, which in 1871 he had claimed would become a “standard work” (L4, 499). The notion of a river trip as the necessary basis for such a book dated from at least March 1866. Clemens continued for many months to plan a trip like the one he outlined here. In December 1874 Howells proposed a New Orleans trip to him (see 12 Jan 75 to Howells, n. 1); in January and February 1875 he unsuccessfully urged Howells, Osgood, and Hay to accompany him there and down the Mississippi that spring; and in the early spring he spoke of going in May or June. He finally made such a trip, but without lecturing, in the spring of 1882. His companions then were Osgood, who published Life on the Mississippi the following year, and Roswell H. Phelps, a Hartford stenographer, who filled a notebook with Clemens’s dictated observations (N&J2, 431–74).