1 Webb, whose letter is lost, was neither editing nor publishing a periodical at this time. Between 7 January and 11 February 1871, however, as “John Paul,” he contributed a weekly column entitled “Things” to Every Saturday, published in Boston by James R. Osgood and Company. He may have been acting on behalf of Osgood or George W. Carleton, his own publisher.

2 For Clemens’s map of the “Fortifications of Paris” and his portrait of William III of Prussia, see 22 Sept 70 to Bliss, nn. 1 and 2, and 18 Oct 70 to Church, n. 1. He continued to regret the similarity of the two satires: for an 1874 reprinting, he deleted his bogus “Commendations of the Portrait,” saying “Leave this out—it is only a repetition of the ‘Commendations’ attached to the ‘Map of Paris’”; and he entirely omitted the sketch from later reprintings of his work (SLC 1873, 586).

3 See 26 Nov 70 to Webb, n. 6.

4 “Three Aces: Jim Todd’s Episode in Social Euchre” appeared in the Buffalo Express on 3 December 1870 (2)—attributed to “Carl Byng,” not to “Hy Slocum.” On 7 January, Every Saturday had carried the following note by editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Mark Twain’s versified story of the ‘Three Aces’ seems to be a feeble echo of Bret Harte. The ‘Truthful James’ vein is one that can be worked successfully only by the owner of the ‘claim’” (“Literary Items,” n.s., 2:19). The 14 January issue of the magazine, which Webb may have seen in proof but too late to correct, committed a similar “villainy,” attributing to Harte the founding of the Californian, which it called “an unsuccessful newspaper enterprise of his own” (“Mr. Francis Bret Harte,” n.s., 2:43). On 28 January, Every Saturday published Webb’s protest that he, not Harte, had established the Californian, and that he, “more than any other was prominently and personally identified with the paper,” which had successfully contributed “towards elevating the tone of Californian journalism and developing the brilliancy which has since burst from the Western horizon” (Webb 1871; L1, 314 n. 5; RI 1993, 699).

5 The previous holiday was 10–17 December, spent in New York City, part of the time with Webb (see p. 269).