1 Probably Clemens’s caption for a rose pressed between the back flyleaf and facing page of this Arabic book (see note 3). The history to which it alludes has not been explained. Clemens’s decision to begin his inscription at the back (which to Western readers would appear to be the front) was deliberate.

2 Clemens was at sea for three different periods during October: in addition to 1–2 October (the one that seems the most likely for this letter), from 7 through 17 October (en route from Alexandria to Gibraltar), and from 25 through 31 October (en route from Gibraltar to Bermuda, where he arrived on 11 November). If, as also seems likely, he intended the book as an amusing gift for his nephew’s seventh birthday on 5 November, he could expect timely delivery in St. Louis by that date only if he sent it on or shortly after his arrival at Alexandria (2 October). But no evidence has been found which would positively exclude a letter date within the second or third October periods at sea.

3 This word falls at the end of the page facing the back flyleaf (originally blank) of the book, an Arabic translation of the New Testament printed in 1866 by the American Mission in Beirut and bound by F. Rosenzweig in maroon leather with gold tooling and brass corner pieces. It was the first such translation ever made: begun in 1847 by missionary Eli Smith, it was completed in 1865 by Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck. Seventy copies of this New Testament in Arabic were evidently prepared as gifts for the Quaker City passengers, presumably from a passenger list sent in advance of the ship’s arrival at Beirut. Each contained a printed presentation sheet pasted onto the front flyleaf (i.e., at what would seem to be the back of the book), with the passenger’s name inscribed in Arabic. Captain Duncan recorded that on the morning of 10 September, the day the Quaker City arrived in Beirut, the Reverend Henry Harris Jessup (1832’1910) came aboard and “invited all our party” to visit the boarding school for girls maintained by the mission at 5:00 that afternoon. Although a party of thirty or forty excursionists accepted the invitation and were presented with their Arabic testaments at the school, Clemens was probably not among them, and must therefore have received his copy later, aboard the ship, possibly that same evening or the next morning (Isham, 1; Severance, 152–53; Charles C. Duncan 1867, entry for 10 Sept).

4 This estimate of missing text is highly conjectural. It assumes that Clemens continued his remarks about beginning “first at one end & then at the other” by completing his last sentence and signing the letter in about an inch of space at the top of the printed presentation sheet. He clearly did write on this sheet, only a fragment of which survives, containing several of the printed words and two insertions in his hand. The printed text here has been supplied from the presumably identical printed sheet pasted onto the front flyleaf in the copy given to Charles Langdon; Clemens’s name in Arabic has been redrawn. (Four of these gift copies are known to have survived: Clemens’s and Langdon’s copies are now at CtHMTH, and are the only ones that have been examined; the existence of Gibson’s is established by Leamington Book Shop, description of lot 131; and Jackson’s copy is described in L. H. S. Robson to Cyril Clemens, 12 Mar 1935, PH in CU-MARK.) Both the text of the printed statement and Clemens’s glosses on it may be incompletely recovered.