1 This letter has been assigned to 1874 on the evidence of the paper, which Clemens used in late 1873 and early 1874, and the ink, which he used through June of 1874. His movements and his sister’s make it unlikely that he wrote the letter before 1874. Since Pamela’s daughter, Annie, would be twenty-two on 1 July, she did not write the “school-girl” essay, at least not recently. But in remarking that Pamela “need not be ashamed of the essay,” Clemens implied that she had some personal stake in its merit. It may therefore have been written by Annie, or Pamela herself (now forty-six), at a “school-girl” age.