1

November 26 was the Sunday following Clemens’s Boston visit, alluded to in paragraph three.

2

In his journal entry for 25 November, Twichell noted: “Received an astounding telegram from Dean Sage asking me to make a trip of three or four months abroad with him!!! I do not at first know at all what to think of it.” On 27 November, Twichell wrote: “Decided, after considerable reflection and some counsel, that I must not accept Dean Sages invitation. There are many reasons why I should but I cannot see that they are sufficient. But it does go against the grain to let such an opportunity slip” (Twichell 1874–1916, 2:124–25).

3While Clemens was in the Boston area to lecture (see the next note), he and Howells ordered an Eastlake-style sideboard that was to be custom made to fit into a niche in the west wall of the dining room in the Hartford house. Photographs of the piece can be found in Courtney 2011 (48, 51, 54). See also 26 Feb 1877 to Howells.

4

James R. Osgood and Company, publishers, were at 113 Franklin Street, in Boston. D. Perkins Ives and Company, dealers in fancy goods, were at 26 and 28 Franklin Street. Clemens had been in and around Boston to give readings from his works. As his seventh paragraph indicates, he had stayed with the Howellses in Cambridge for at least part of the time (19 Oct 1876 to Saunders, n. 2; Boston Directory 1876, 478, 984, 1014).

5The Clemenses wished to commission a portrait of Clemens by artist and journalist Francis David Millet (1843–1912). After graduating from Harvard in 1869 with a degree in literature, Millet studied art in Europe. When he returned to the United States in 1876, he served as an assistant to John La Farge (1835–1910) in the decoration of Boston’s Trinity Church, and became a successful portraitist (see note 8). In 1877–78 he served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald. He was deeply mourned when he died on the Titanic in 1912 (AutoMT3, 461; 7 Aug 1877 to Millet, n. 1).

6

Nothing is known of Charles Dudley Warner’s supposed grudge against Howells. Neither the letter nor the poem by Winifred Howells, nearly thirteen, has been found. For an earlier poem by her that Clemens admired, see his letter of 18 April 1875 to Olivia Clemens (L6, 450–51; Howells 1979, 171).

7

Fanny C. Hesse, Clemens’s secretary.

8

An allusion to a critique (some or all of it in the manner of Omar Khayyám) of John Habberton’s sentimental novel, Helen’s Babies, With Some Account of Their Ways, Innocent, Crafty, Angelic, Impish, Witching and Repulsive (1876), which Clemens enclosed for the Atlantic Monthly, probably for the Contributors’ Club (the enclosure has not been found). In a letter of 31 Oct 1877 to Fairbanks he called the book “nauseous & idiotic” (for Clemens’s other disparaging remarks about the novel see Gribben 1980, 1:283). In the second paragraph of his reply Howells explained his reason for rejecting the critique (CU-MARK):

UCLC 32446

On the envelope of Howells’s letter Fanny C. Hesse noted “Millet’s letter enclosed | answered Dec 6th/76.” No 6 December letter from Clemens to either Howells or Millet has been found, however. Before departing for Europe, Millet did go to Hartford, in January 1877, to paint Clemens (see 17 Jan 1877 to Boyesen). The “saints” he mentioned evidently were in La Farge’s murals in Trinity Church. The “head” Millet did was for, and perhaps of, railroad expert and civic leader Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835–1915), whose secretary he had been in 1873 when Adams was Massachusetts commissioner to the Vienna Exposition. The paintings by Eugene Benson (1839–1908) that Howells alluded to have not been identified. One of them belonged to Howells’s acquaintance Thomas Gold Appleton (29 Jan 1876 to Twichell, n. 3). About “spot ivy” Howells planned to consult another acquaintance, Asa Gray (1810–88), a renowned botanist and former Harvard professor who maintained a large herbarium. The play Howells alluded to was Ah Sin (Howells 1979b, 88, 97–98).