1 Clemens did not submit his manuscript for Roughing It to Bliss all at once, but forwarded it in several batches. On 10 July 1871 he promised to “fix up & forward” his fourth batch the next day (L4, 431). The editors of the 1993 edition of Roughing It showed that since Clemens added out-of-sequence chapters both before and during typesetting, his manuscript chapter numbers did not match those in the printed book. They conjectured that after July four chapters (36, 49, 52, and 53) were added, while one (the Mountain Meadows massacre narrative) was removed to an appendix: the difference between manuscript and book numbers was therefore four minus one, or three. The batch of manuscript transmitted on 11 July was thought to include book chapters 54–57, numbered 51–54 in the manuscript. This conjecture was based in part on a variation in the printed chapter headings for chapters 58–75, 77, and 79—evidence that chapter 57 was probably the last in a batch, and that chapter 58 began another batch, typeset at a later date. The present letter, discovered in 1994, suggests that book chapter 57 corresponded to Clemens’s “Chapter 55”—the last in his batch—rather than to manuscript chapter 54, as previously conjectured. If only three chapters, instead of four, were added late (36, 49, and 53), the difference between manuscript and book chapter numbers would have been only two. It now seems likely that the 11 July batch comprised five chapters, numbered 51–55 in the manuscript, 52 and 54–57 in the book (53 was probably a late addition) (see RI 1993, 814–15, 852–62; L4, 432 n. 4).

2 No reply is known to survive.