Clemens pasted in the clipping scrofulous humor which he had taken from an advertisement for Vegetine in that morning’s Hartford Courant. Vegetine was a patent medicine advertised in newspapers across the country as a “blood remedy,” claiming to cure “Scrofulous Humor . . . Cancerous Humor . . . Mercurial Diseases . . . Tumors,” and more (“The ‘Lost Art’ Recovered,” Hartford Courant, 1 Jan 1876, 2; “The Great Blood Remedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Dec 1875, 3). Although damage to Clemens's postcard makes the words illegible, Howells's reply confirms their presence here (CU-MARK; Howells’s letters to Clemens are included in this edition courtesy of W. W. Howells):

“C. D. W.” was author Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), a hartford neighbor of the Clemenses', who was on an extended trip to Europe and the Near East that began on 8 October 1874 and ended on 1 July 1876. The trip produced seven articles for the Atlantic Monthly in 1875–76, as well as two books. Clemens himself contributed only three sketches to the Atlantic Monthly in 1876: “A Literary Nightmare,” “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” and “The Canvasser’s Tale,” in February, June, and December, respectively (SLC 1876). His “jumping-frog” was not a copy of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches (SLC 1867), as previously thought (MTHL, 1:118 n. 3). Rather, it was one of his 1876 New Year’s cards. The card Clemens sent to the Howellses, probably on 30 or 31 December 1875, his first known communication with them since 23 November, has not been recovered (for another example of it, see the next letter). Clemens’s novel presumably was the unidentified work he had been writing in late 1875. His “boy-book” was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (SLC 1876; see 18 Jan 1876 to howells, n. 3).