1Clemens was planning a trip to Baltimore to attend the rehearsals for Ah Sin at Ford’s Opera House, where the play was scheduled to open after its week in Washington. In the hope of securing an interview with President Hayes at the White House, he carried a letter of introduction from Howells, which is not known to survive.

2Hayes had recently invited the Howells family to visit him in the White House. Howells replied on 9 April: “Elinor opened your letter, and read it aloud. The children were all for starting at once to Washington. In the meantime we thank you cordially for your kind invitation, and hope some time to profit by it” (Howells 1979a, 163–64). In late June 1877, the Howellses spent “a most exciting week” with Hayes in Boston, and then in Newport. On 2 July Howells wrote his father, “I never saw so popular a man, and I greatly admired the perfect taste and sense of all that he said and did.— Probably we shall go to visit at the White House this winter or fall.” Although he was unable to accept “five or six” more invitations later in the year, he and Elinor did finally travel to Washington for a visit in May 1880 (Howells 1979a, 168, 179–80, 251).