1 Clemens made this change in his travel plans probably no sooner than the evening of 28 June. His advertisement in the 29 June Alta California (page 2) announced a single lecture on the evening of 2 July, a “farewell benefit of the future widows and orphans of Mark Twain,” which was entitled “The Oldest of the Republics, VENICE, Past and Present.” Clemens also wrote and published an elaborate handbill, dated 30 June, in the form of a burlesque “call,” ostensibly signed by prominent San Francisco institutions and individuals who, having learned “with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go,” expressed their “cordial desire that you will not.” Clemens’s ostensible reply was:

The lecture must, in fact, have been taken more or less wholesale from the manuscript that later became chapters 22 and 23 of The Innocents Abroad, if only because Clemens had no time to prepare anything else.

2 Clemens sailed on the Montana on 6 July, boarded the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall (Panama) on 20 July, and arrived in New York on Wednesday, 29 July (“Mark Twain,” San Francisco Alta California, 6 July 68, 1; “Passengers Arrived” and “Arrived,” New York Times, 30 July 68, 8). He described both legs of this journey in a dispatch to the Alta dated “August, Recently, 1868” (SLC 1868 [MT00748]).