1 Howells’s telegram does not survive, but his follow-up letter does (CU-MARK):

Howells answered Clemens’s letter of 22 August and a letter written about a week later, now lost but alluded to in Clemens’s second paragraph. When he received it, Howells was packing for his family’s Saturday, 29 August, return to Cambridge from their summer quarters in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (Howells 1979, 66). For Charles Pope’s response to the translation Howells finished sending him that same day, see note 4. Howells’s letter did not reach Clemens for four months: the postmarks on its envelope indicate that it arrived in Elmira on 3 January 1875, whereupon Theodore Crane readdressed and remailed it to Hartford. Howells’s joke about Sir Walter Scott (“the Waverley man”) has not been explained.

2 Mary Ann (“Auntie”) Cord (1798–1888), a former slave, was the Cranes’ cook at Quarry Farm. She had lost her husband and seven children when the family was broken up and sold around 1852, only to be miraculously reunited, thirteen years later, with her youngest son, Henry, then a soldier in the Union army. Henry, who had escaped to Elmira before the Civil War and become a barber, brought his mother back with him when he resumed his career there. Mary Cord told the Clemenses the story of the separation and reunion on or shortly before 28 June 1874 (see 3 July 74 to OLC, n. 1). Clemens’s moving version, “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” in which he called Mary Cord “Aunt Rachel,” was his debut in the Atlantic Monthly, appearing in November 1874. The following year he reprinted the story in Sketches, New and Old (Wisbey 1981, 1, 3; SLC: 1874; 1875, 202–7). In 1907 Howells remembered that he did not pay “lightly” for it:

For Howells’s 1875 assessment of “A True Story” and the “confusion” it caused in the “average critical mind,” see pp. 657–58. For Houghton, see 11 Dec 74 to Houghton and Company, n. 1.

3 It was almost certainly during one of his most recent visits to New York— in late June and early July, on his way to and from Hartford—that Clemens told the “yarn” to John Hay and William Seaver, and possibly other “company” as well (see p. 171 and 25 Sept 74 to Seaver).

4 This photograph, taken by Elisha Van Aken of Elmira (see the next letter, n. 6), survives without a cover letter of its own and was probably enclosed here. Howells alluded to it—and to two other photographs, now lost—in his reply to this letter (CU-MARK):

Clemens had praised A Foregone Conclusion in his letter of 21 June to Howells. The fable evidently was not his first failure with the Atlantic. Around mid-December 1874 he told Joseph H. Twichell that “the first two pieces he sent to the Atlantic were rejected” (Twichell, 1:38). The earlier unsuccessful piece has not been identified. Howells was doubtless correct in thinking the fable too indelicate for the magazine’s readers. Published as the three-part “Some Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls” in Sketches, New and Old in 1875, it depicts a scientific expedition in which the ludicrous researchers are an assortment of animals and insects who misinterpret their findings, get drunk, and are repeatedly irreverent. This printed version, typeset from a manuscript now at the New York Public Library (NN-B), does not explicitly mention Sisyphus and Atlas, but does have its Tumble-Bug observe that he comes “of a race that rolled their fragrant spheres down the solemn aisles of antiquity” (SLC 1875, 139). Clemens did not add any “circumstantiation” to “A True Story” (see 20 Sept 74 to Howells, n. 1). The missing photograph of the “whole landscape” may have been an exterior view of Clemens’s study identical to the one enclosed in the next letter. The “asthma” photograph has not been identified. Howells’s “dispoged” echoes Sairey Gamp in Dickens’s Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, a book Clemens knew well. Charles Pope had written to Howells on 4 September, expressing his satisfaction with Howells’s work: “I could wish for nothing better, and I believe no one could have done it better” (Howells 1979, 64 n. 3; MTHL, 2:863; L1, 104–5, 112, 190, 193; L5, 490).