Clemens left New York on “the New Jersey Central at 8 P.M.” of 3 March and arrived in St. Louis at midnight on the night of 5 March: “I went straight home and sat up till breakfast time, talking and telling other lies” (SLC 1867). Clemens’s remark that things were “going well here, with the pilots” may indicate that he was publicizing his forthcoming Jumping Frog book among his friends on the river; no mention of the book has been found, however, in the river columns of St. Louis or New Orleans newspapers at this time.

When Clemens departed New York, both he and Webb expected to publish in a matter of weeks. On 8 March the New York Evening Post reported that Webb was “about to publish” the book (“New Books,” 1). In reply to Clemens’s letter, however, Webb must have telegraphed that it could not be published until sometime in April. He probably named no exact date, for he did not register the book for copyright (as “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) until a month later, on 15 April, and Clemens did not specify a publication date until he wrote the Alta from New York on 19 April, naming 25 April, which would prove optimistic by five or six days ( ET&S1 , 542–43; SLC 1867). Mark Twain explained, in another Alta dispatch, that on 17 March he had been asked to “make a few remarks” to a Sunday school, and that he “told that admiring multitude all about Jim Smiley’s Jumping Frog,” which in turn led to a more formal invitation. “I did not intend to lecture in St. Louis, but I got a call to do something of that kind for the benefit of a Sunday School.” On 25 March he delivered his Sandwich Islands lecture before an overflow crowd of about one thousand at Mercantile Library Hall, for the benefit of the South St. Louis Mission Sunday School. The St. Louis Republican registered a typical reaction, which Mark Twain quoted for his California readers: “The audience was large and appreciative.... He succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting. He interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience” (“Mark Twain’s Lecture on the Sandwich Islands,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 26 Mar 67, 3; SLC 1867). Clemens repeated the lecture in the same hall on 26 March but, evidently because of bad weather, to an audience he later estimated at about eighty. Publicity both for and from these two lectures soon prompted at least three further invitations to lecture in towns along the river, which he accepted, starting with Hannibal, where on 2 April he lectured in Brittingham Hall “to the largest and most delighted crowd ever gathered in a public hall in that city.” He then spoke at Keokuk, Iowa, on 8 April and at Quincy, Illinois, on 9 April (Emerson had spoken in both towns during February) (Fatout, 71–73; “The Veritable Individual Himself,” Quincy Herald, 4 Apr 67, in Davis 1979, 1; Quincy Herald: “Mark Twain,” 5 Apr 67, 4, and “Lecture Report,” 17 Apr 67, 4; Bower, 4).

The three-story brick house at this address was the residence of Clemens’s widowed sister, Pamela Ann Moffett. The Moffetts had first rented the house in 1860; although forced to move when the owner briefly took possession during the war, they soon returned. The household at this time included (in addition to Pamela) Clemens’s niece, Annie (aged fourteen), and nephew, Sammy (aged six); his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens; a German maid, Margaret; and possibly his brother Orion, who was back from work on the Tennessee land by 11 March, but may have left for Keokuk to see his wife by the date of this letter (MTBus , 47; Webster, 1; OC 1867).