1 On 18 June Clemens wrote his first letter for the New York Herald, in which he described his trip to Ostend on 17 June, his overnight stay there, and his return on H.M.S. Lively, together with several of the shah’s family members and retainers and some half-dozen fellow journalists, most of whom had accompanied the shah on the train from Brussels to Ostend (SLC 1873). News companies were distributors of magazines and cheap paper-covered books, which they sold to the public primarily at newsstands and railroad stations. In 1867 Charles Henry Webb named the “AMERICAN NEWS CO., AGENTS”—one of the largest of these companies, located in New York—on the title page of the Jumping Frog book. And in 1874 Clemens published a small pamphlet, Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One, which was printed in Hartford but distributed through the American News Company (Tebbel, 106, 353, 393; Shove, 23, 32, 61).