1 George Cumming, an operator with the Western Union Company in New York City, was an occasional contributor to the Telegrapher, a union weekly issued from 1864 to 1877 in New York (Mott 1938, 92). On 22 May it reprinted the paragraph Clemens alluded to, identifying its source as “one of Mr. Cumming’s letters to the Springfield (Ohio) Republic”: It is not known how the paragraph “encountered” Clemens; possibly Cumming sent him a clipping from the Springfield newspaper. “Greek” was a “sobriquet often applied to Irishmen, in jocular allusion to their soi-disant Milesian origin” (Bartlett 1859, 179). Milesius was a mythical Spanish king whose followers allegedly conquered Ireland in about 1300 b.c. and thus became the Celtic ancestors of the Irish. Wendell Phillips—the orator, former abolitionist, and acquaintance of Clemens’s and the Langdon family’s (see L3, 175)—delivered his enduringly popular “Lost Arts” lecture over two thousand times. Its theme was that most modern inventions were not in fact new, but relied on arts that had been developed centuries earlier. These arts were then “lost” because “privileged aristocrats had monopolized them” until the advent of democracy (Stewart, 181).

2 Clemens had recently been reading aloud to Olivia from The Dialogues of Plato, edited by Benjamin Jowett. He had given her the four-volume set as a Christmas gift in 1874 (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1873, copy inscribed to OLC at NvU; OLC to Langdon, 9 May 75, CtHMTH; Gribben, 2:549).