1 Clemens attended an inauguration dinner for the lord mayor elect (Sir Sydney Waterlow) on the evening of Monday, 4 November. His engraved invitation, requesting the “favor of an early answer,” survives in the Mark Twain Papers. The banquet, held in the hall of the Stationers’ Company, was attended by about a hundred guests (“The Lord Mayor Elect,” London Times, 5 Nov 72, 10).

2 Olivia’s telegram does not survive. Clemens sailed from Liverpool on the Cunard steamship Batavia, bound for New York via Boston, on Tuesday, 12 November, having left London the previous day.

3 Lee was a member of the Linnean Society of London, founded in 1788 to commemorate Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and promote the study of natural history. In 1829 the society became the repository for Linnaeus’s library and collection of specimens. Lee, who also belonged to the society’s dining club, brought Clemens as his dinner guest on the evening of 7 November; both men signed the book in which the club’s minutes were recorded (Weinreb and Hibbert, 460–61; Linnean Club Minute Book, entry for 7 Nov 72, Linnean Society of London Archives; information from the Linnean Society of London).

4 By the end of the letter Clemens’s handwriting had become a loose scrawl.