1 The self-portrait is on page 1, and this note on page 4, of a monogram letterhead folder, with pages 2 and 3 left blank. Clemens wrote “over” to make sure that Aldrich did not miss the letter.

2 Aldrich’s response, dated 1 January 1875, was postmarked 4 January (CU-MARK). On the front of its envelope Clemens made this notation:

On the back of the envelope, Aldrich wrote a note to be read before the letter itself:

In facetiously casting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes as masked conspirators, Aldrich may have planted the seed for Clemens’s playful depiction of them as tramps in his famous Whittier dinner speech of 17 December 1877 (see MTHL, 1:212; Fatout 1976, 110–15). Aldrich’s letter read:

Of the “near seventy” pictures Clemens claimed to have sent on 31 December, and the twenty Aldrich acknowledged receiving, only the present inscribed drawing is known to survive. Aldrich may have alluded to the cover of Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One. Its engraving, which depicted a bespectacled frog reclining under a toadstool, smoking, and reading the pamphlet, was printed in at least two different background colors, orange and green, both on gray-green paper; in neither one, however, was the frog yellow (copies in CU-MARK and DLC; 7 May 74 to Spofford). He also alluded to chapters 10 and 11 of Roughing It, in which Clemens cited Thomas J. Dimsdale’s The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Fustice in the Rocky Mountains. Being a Correct and Impartial Narrative of the Chase, Trial, Capture and Execution of Henry Plummer’s Road Agent Band (1866) (see RI 1993, 64, 69, 585–88, 811, 1034).