No letters written between 20 and 26 January 1872 have been found. After his weekend in Harrisburg, Clemens moved on to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where his lecture of 22 January “was more largely attended than any of the previous ones of the course”; attendance was estimated at six hundred (“The lecture . . . ,” Carlisle Herald, 25 Jan 72, no page; Fatout 1960, 171). He was in Baltimore on 23 January, speaking to a “thronged” hall. The Baltimore Sun noted that his “comical appearance as he entered alone, at once excited laughter, and his gestures and speech, which are of an apparently lazy character, with his humor and paradoxical ideas, kept his audience in the best humor for over one and a half hours” (“Mark Twain in the Maryland Institute,” 24 Jan 72, 1). In Baltimore, apparently, lecture manager T. B. Pugh approached Clemens about delivering a second Philadelphia lecture on 9 February (Clemens had already lectured there on 20 November). Clemens gave him no definite response, but the next day (24 January), when he reached New York, he telegraphed Redpath to tell Pugh that he “could not lecture again in Phila this Season” (Pugh to SLC, 26 Jan 72, CU-MARK; L4 , 497; see also 20 Jan 73 to Pughclick to open link).

Clemens’s New York lecture was a benefit for the Mercantile Library, founded in 1820 by a group of mercantile clerks. By 1871, with about thirteen thousand subscribers and one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, it had become “the fourth in size of the libraries of this country, and the largest lending-library in America” (Hassard, 353). Borrowing privileges were available even to nonmembers for only five dollars a year, and they were free to editors of the press. Its main reading room and reference and circulating collection were housed at Clinton Hall on Astor Place (Hassard, 361; Disturnell, 115; Moses King 1893, 328). Clemens’s friend John Rose Greene Hassard reported in Scribner’s Monthly, “Of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad the library has 115 copies, all of which are constantly in use and ordered in advance” (Hassard, 363).

The lecture was to be Clemens’s first appearance in New York City since May 1867, when, with great trepidation, he had first addressed an eastern audience. Despite the success of that first lecture, he was again understandably anxious about having a “good house” in New York, as he had more than once expressed to Redpath in recent weeks (2 Jan 72 to Redpath, n. 2click to open link; L2 , 40–44). His fears were to prove groundless: the lecture was unusually well noticed in advance by the press, insuring a large attendance. Not only did the Mercantile Library Association place advertisements in the major New York newspapers, there were items in the news and editorial columns as well. On 18 January the Tribune provided an important endorsement—something it did not customarily do for lecturers—with a paragraph on its editorial page mentioning the “extraordinary success” of the “Roughing It” lecture: “It is said to be the most entertaining of all his productions for the lyceum” (18 Jan 72, 4). And on the day of the lecture, again on its editorial page, the Tribune predicted “one of the best audiences of the season,” while the Evening Express carried the following notice in its news columns: “The Mercantile Library Association appeal for a large house, at Steinway Hall, tonight, with Mark Twain and one of the most amusing of his efforts. They invest the profits in the Library, and look to the public to buy tickets” (“Mark Twain’s lecture . . . ,” New York Tribune, 24 Jan 72, 4; New York Evening Express, 24 Jan 72, 3). The result was that Steinway Hall was filled literally to overflowing with a crowd of “over 2,000” (see the enclosure with 26 Jan 72 to Redpathclick to open link). The New York Times reviewer noted:

The New York Herald reported, “Everybody appeared to have gone expecting to be amused, and if uproarious mirth might be taken as an evidence, their expectations were thoroughly fulfilled” (“Mark Twain’s Lecture,” 25 Jan 72, 3).

After the lecture, Clemens stayed at the St. Nicholas Hotel, then returned home to Hartford, probably on 25 January, for several days (“Prominent Arrivals,” New York Tribune, 25 Jan 72, 8).