1 Young, former managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Clemens’s friend since 1867, had been a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald since 1872, reporting chiefly from London and Paris. Clemens wrote the present letter very shortly after the preceding one—as midnight struck, and therefore probably on 7 January, although it is possible that he wrote both letters at midnight on 6 January (L5, 383 n. 1).

2 Built in 1832, the Golden Cross Hotel, at 452 Strand, replaced an earlier inn of the same name, which had figured in The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield (Kent, 398; Baedeker, 8).