0The present text, notes, and apparatus supersede those previously published in L2, 200. L2’s version is available here.

1The article may have been the “short magazine article,” not further identified, which Clemens said he wrote at the end of January (31 Jan 1868 to Beach). William Conant Church (1836–1917) was one of the editors of the Galaxy magazine, which had just published Mark Twain’s “General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant” in its February issue (SLC 1868). Church had begun his editorial career assisting his father on the New York Chronicle. Later he published the New York Sun for a short time, and served as Washington correspondent for the New York Times during the war. He and his brother, Francis Pharcellus Church (1839–1906), founded the Galaxy in May 1866 and served as co-editors until its demise in 1878, according to Frank Luther Mott. Mott, who saw the original in the “Willard Church Collection,” is the chief authority for which of the two brothers Clemens here addressed. Some doubt may arise because Mott, in quoting several other letters written by Clemens to the Galaxy in 1870, identified their addressee as William, even though all the Galaxy’s known replies were written and signed by Francis (Mott 1957, 361–67; Francis P. Church to SLC, various dates, 1870–71, CU-MARK). But Mott might well have seen envelopes or dockets for one or more of Clemens’s letters; and even without such evidence, the possibility remains that Francis routinely replied on his brother’s behalf.