1 On returning from St. Louis, Clemens spent four or five days at the Metropolitan before moving on 19 April to the Westminster (“Arrivals in the City,” New York Times, 20 Apr 67, 8). It is possible that he had roomed at the Westminster before going to St. Louis, since his Alta letters written on 2 and 18 February allude to his rooming in East Sixteenth Street (SLC 1867 [MT00525]–o). In a later letter to the Alta, he summarized his reasons for preferring “the European system” recently adopted by hotels like the Westminster, where everything was “quiet, and genteel and orderly.” He noted that “it is costly, but it is comfortable—prodigiously comfortable,” especially in comparison with the “great caravan hotels” like the Metropolitan (SLC 1867 [MT00540]).

2 Sobieski (Beck) Jolly (1831–1905) was a well-respected river pilot and a friend of Clemens’s since they met in the fall of 1857, when Clemens served as a cub pilot under Jolly on the John J. Roe (L1, 74). He was currently piloting the Virginia between New Orleans and St. Louis, where he almost certainly saw Clemens in mid-March (“River News,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 16 Mar 67, 4).

3 If James Russell Lowell (1819–91) made such a statement about Mark Twain’s “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” it has not been independently documented. The attribution is suspect because a New York correspondent for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported on 24 January that according to Webb, Lowell had called Webb’s just-published Liffith Lank “the best thing of the kind ever written in America’ (“Gossip from New York,” letter dated 24 Jan, San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 19 Feb 67, 1).

4 Dorsey is unidentified, although he was probably the same man Clemens mentioned in an 1861 Nevada letter (George Turner and SLC to OC, 18–30 Sept 61, L1, 128).

5 Clemens seems routinely to have used Orion’s name, rather than his mother’s, in addressing envelopes for letters written to her and the family. Jane Clemens was not listed in the 1867 St. Louis directory, although both Pamela Moffett and Orion Clemens were (Edwards 1867, 257, 582).