No letters are known to survive between 15 May and 7 June 1871. During that three weeks Clemens at first continued work on Roughing It, perhaps attempting to keep up the pace he described in his 15 May letter to Bliss. Toward the end of the month, he evidently wrote to David Gray about plans for publication, announcing for the first time his intention to protect English copyright by simultaneous publication in England, and Gray ran the following item on page one of the Buffalo Courier of 31 May:
Mark Twain’s New Book.—Mark Twain’s new book, same size and style as the “Innocents Abroad,” and as copiously illustrated, will be published in the fall, and will appear simultaneously in England and America. Dealing as it does with certain hitherto unrecorded phases of western life, it will be of historic value, as well as aboundingly humorous.
Clemens interrupted his work to go to Hartford, perhaps stopping for a day or two at the St. Nicholas Hotel in New York (“Morning Arrivals,” New York Express, 31 May 71, 3, listing a “Clemens J, Elmira”). After his arrival in Hartford on 1 or 2 June, he gave Bliss the third batch of manuscript, which probably consisted of what became chapters 15–35, 37–48, 50–51, and possibly two later chapters he thought suitable for the prospectus, 76 and 78 (“Brief Mention,” Hartford Courant, 3 June 71, 2; RI 1993 , 855). In addition, he spent time with Orion and Mollie, inspecting and discussing Orion’s inventions, and visited with several Hartford friends, including the Twichells (Joseph Twichell had sent him a letter on 8 May that began, “Mark! Mark! dear friend of days gone by, whose delights we tasted in those happy though distant times when thou didst lodge with us and sit smoking at our fireside, where art thou?” [CU-MARK]). On 4 June he attended services at Twichell’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church and had dinner with Connecticut Governor Marshall Jewell. On 5 or 6 June he rejoined his family at his mother-in-law’s house in Elmira. He may then have begun work on what became chapter 54 of Roughing It, which opens with a reference to a news item that appeared in the New York Tribune of 3 June (“A Chinaman Stoned to Death by Boys,” 1), but he apparently did not immediately resume his daily routine of going to Quarry Farm to write, and he soon put Roughing It aside entirely for another three weeks (7 June 71 to OC and MECclick to open link; 10 June 71 to Redpath and Fallclick to open link; RI 1993 , 369, 856; 27 June 71click to open link [2nd], 29 June 71click to open link, both to OC).