1 The enclosure has not been found. The check probably was for all or part of the $4,309.42 that Clemens had allowed Jervis Langdon to hold for him on 10 March. He may now have wanted the funds because of his recent loan to Larned, or for a payment on his debt to Kennett, or for the expenses he alludes to in the next letter. With Langdon still traveling and John D. F. Slee in Buffalo, Crane—like Slee, Langdon’s business associate and soon-to-be partner—was responsible for sending the check to Clemens (11 Mar 70 to Bliss; 16 and 17 Apr 70 to the Langdons).

2 Neither Mrs. Brown nor “Bell” has been identified. They probably were not Anna Marsh Brown, and her husband, Talmage. Anna Brown may already have visited the Clemenses (27 Mar 70 to the Langdons).

3 Isaac H. Bailey (1821–95), a tin cutter manufacturer, was a fellow parishioner of the Langdons’ and Cranes’ at Congregational Church. Clemens may have been surprised at Bailey’s reported election because, since its founding in June 1869, the Elmira Industrial School, which the Langdons and Cranes helped support, had been managed by a group of women volunteers. Among them was Anna M. Crane, Theodore Crane’s half sister, who was one of the teachers, and Mrs. J. D. Steele, the superintendent (possibly outgoing). At the school’s two-hour sessions, currently held on Saturday afternoons at the First Methodist Church, about fifty girls “from homes of poverty and vice” were encouraged in habits of “punctuality, improvement and cleanliness” while being taught to sew. The goal was for pupils to learn “how to earn bread, . . . quite as important to the poor as a knowledge of Geography and Grammar” (“Industrial School,” Elmira Advertiser, 1 Mar 70, 4; “Death of Isaac Bailey,” Elmira Gazette and Free Press, 31 May 95, 8; Boyd and Boyd, 62; “Annual Report of the Industrial School,” Elmira Saturday Evening Review, 9 July 70, 8; Gretchen Sharlow and Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., personal communications).