November 26 was the Sunday following Clemens’s Boston visit, alluded to in paragraph three.

In his journal entry for 25 November, Twichell noted: “Received an astounding telegram from Dean Sage asking me to make a trip of three or four months abroad with him!!! I do not at first know at all what to think of it.” On 27 November, Twichell wrote: “Decided, after considerable reflection and some counsel, that I must not accept Dean Sages invitation. There are many reasons why I should but I cannot see that they are sufficient. But it does go against the grain to let such an opportunity slip” (Twichell 1874–1916, 2:124–25).

Howells and Clemens had picked out this sideboard together while Clemens was in the Boston area to lecture (see the next note).

James R. Osgood and Company, publishers, were at 113 Franklin Street, in Boston. D. Perkins Ives and Company, dealers in fancy goods, were at 26 and 28 Franklin Street. Clemens had been in and around Boston while lecturing at the Boston Music Hall on 21 November (Tuesday), in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on 23 November (Thursday), and in Providence, Rhode Island, on 24 November (Friday). As his seventh paragraph indicates, he had stayed with the Howellses in Cambridge for at least part of the time (19 Oct 76 to Saundersclick to open link, n. 2; Boston Directory 1876, 478, 984, 1014).

The Clemenses wished to commission a portrait of Clemens by Francis D. Millet (1846–1912), the artist and journalist. See n. 8.

Nothing is known of Charles Dudley Warner’s supposed grudge against Howells. Neither the letter nor the poem by Winifred Howells, nearly thirteen, has been found. For an earlier poem by her that Clemens admired, see L6 , 450–51 (Howells 1979, 171).

Fanny C. Hesse, Clemens’s secretary.

An allusion to a critique (some or all of it in the manner of Omar Khayyám) of John Habberton’s sentimental novel, Helen’s Babies, that Clemens enclosed for the Atlantic Monthly, probably for the Contributors’ Club (Habberton 1876). The enclosure does not survive (but for Clemens’s other disparaging remarks about Habberton’s novel, see Gribben 1980, 1:283). The second paragraph of Howells’s reply explained its rejection (CU-MARK):

On the envelope of Howells’s letter Fanny C. Hesse noted “Millet’s letter enclosed | answered Dec 6th/76.” No 6 December letter from Clemens to either Howells or Millet has been found, however. Before Millet departed for Europe, where in 1877 he became the New York Herald correspondent assigned to the Russian forces in the Russo-Turkish War, he did go to Hartford to paint Clemens. The portrait he completed in January 1877 is now owned by the Hannibal Free Public Library (for a photograph of it, see Schmidt 2005). The “saints” Millet alluded to evidently were in John La Farge’s murals decorating the interior of Trinity Church in Boston. Millet was one of the artists who helped La Farge (1835–1910) paint them in 1876. The “head” Millet did was for, and perhaps of, railroad expert and civic leader Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835–1915), whose secretary he had been in 1873 when Adams was Massachusetts commissioner to the Vienna Exposition. The paintings by Eugene Benson (1839–1908) that Howells alluded to have not been identified. One of them belonged to Howells’s acquaintance Thomas Gold Appleton (see 29 Jan 76 to Twichellclick to open link, n. 3). About “spot ivy” Howells planned to consult another acquaintance, Asa Gray (1810–88), the renowned botanist and former Harvard professor, who maintained a large herbarium. The play Howells alluded to was Ah Sin (see 13 Dec 76click to open link and 29 Dec 76click to open link, both to Conway; SLC 1876–85, 13; MTB , 2:583; “Frank D. Millet’s Career,” New York Times, 16 Apr 1912, 4; Howells 1979, 88, 97–98).