1Clemens’s “welcome missive,” now lost, was presumably written two days before Fields’s reply. At a later date, Clemens wrote on Fields’s envelope, in pencil, “James T. Fields (author of ‘Yesterday with Authors’).” Fields’s book had been published in 1872. He lectured at Seminary Hall in Hartford on Wednesday, 22 March, on Wordsworth, the first in his series of six lectures (Hartford Courant: “Lectures by James T. Fields of Boston,” 18 Mar 1876, 2; “Mr. Field[s]’s Lecture on Wordsworth,” 23 Mar 1876, 2). For Clemens’s St. Patrick letter, see 16 Mar 1876 to McCloud. Fields presumably saw the reprint of it in the Boston Advertiser for 20 March (“In General,” 1).