1 The dating of this letter is highly conjectural. It might have been written to Redpath, or perhaps to John Hay or others with access to metropolitan newspapers, but the “item” that Clemens wished to have printed has not been found. The contemplated “five-act drama” might have been the play that Clemens had in the “matrix,” according to his 25 February letter to Fairbanks. A twenty-page play fragment, consisting of a single scene, the beginning of “Act. 1,” set in a “low rum-shop” in Virginia City, Nevada, survives in the Mark Twain Papers. Its stationery was demonstrably used in 1868 and from 1872 through the middle of 1874. Elements of the scene resemble the barroom episode in chapter 31 of Roughing It; the complete text of the play fragment is transcribed in RI 1972, 536–41 (SLC 1873–74?; RI 1993, 201–5, 630). The “idle” book may have been the planned work on England.