Clemens answered the following note from Howells, written on the back of its enclosure and mailed on 4 December (CU-MARK):

Howells’s cover note alluded to Anna Dickinson’s novel about an interracial romance, What Answer?, which he had reviewed tolerantly, but negatively, in the Atlantic Monthly for January 1869 (Dickinson 1868; Howells 1869, 134–35; Atlantic Index 1889, 105). The request from Belford Brothers was in response to “The Atlantic Monthly for 1877. Twentieth Year,” in the front advertising pages of the December 1876 number of the magazine. There it was announced that Mark Twain “will be a frequent contributor to the Atlantic during the year.” In fact, at this time Clemens was committed for only a single piece—which, Howells knew, was about Dickinson—for the January 1877 “Contributors’ Club” (see 11 Oct 76 to Howellsclick to open link, n. 11). Late in the year, however, he contributed his three-part “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” about his first trip to Bermuda. The Canadian pirates included that sketch, along with several others, in their Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion, issued in 1878 (SLC 1877, SLC 1878). Howells’s reply to Clemens’s letter has not been found.