1 The 15 February invitation to which Clemens replied does not survive, but it clearly came from a committee representing the Young People’s Association of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church. Late in 1869 that association again tried to schedule a lecture by Clemens (see 6 Dec 69 to Redpath). Both Horatio Collins King (1837–1918) and John Raymond Howard (1837–1926) were members of Plymouth Church—King since 1866, Howard since 1857. King, a New York lawyer, was married to Howard’s sister, Esther. Their brother Edward Tasker Howard (1844–1918) had met Clemens in Hawaii in 1866 (see L1, 346 n.10, where, however, he is misidentified as an Englishman). John Howard, formerly an editorial writer for the New York Times and other papers, since early 1868 had been a member of the New York subscription house of J. B. Ford and Company, which published Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher, among others. In the early 1870s King and Howard both worked with Beecher on the Christian Union, and Howard later wrote Henry Ward Beecher: A Study of His Personality, Career, and Influence in Public Affairs (1891) and edited numerous anthologies of essays, orations, and poetry (Howard and Jervis, 1:294; “Edward Tasker Howard,” New York Times, 9 Aug 1918, 11; Noyes L. Thompson, 243, 244; “A New Publishing House,” New York Evening Post, 8 Jan 68, 2; Mott 1957, 422–23, 425).

2 King’s business address. His home address was 150 Hicks Street, Brooklyn (Wilson 1868, 591).

3 King further adorned the envelope with a sketch of a house beneath an inverted pyramid of ditto marks and dashes.