Massett (Jeems Pipes of Pipesville), the veteran comic journalist, songwriter, and entertainer whom Clemens had met in the offices of the San Francisco Call in May or June 1868, was living in New York City at the St. Denis Hotel, when not traveling as a correspondent for the New York Evening Telegram and as a lecturer ( L2 , 231 n. 12; “The Lecture Season,” New York Evening Telegram, 7 Aug 69, 2). Ten days before the present letter, Clemens had reprinted in the Express this sardonic squib from the Brooklyn Eagle: “On Sunday morning last at the Episcopal Church (St. Marys) at Peekskill, Mr. Stephen Massett delivered a sermon from the text ‘Nothing but Leaves,’ for the benefit of the funds of the church. If Massett’s sermons are only as serious as his comic lectures they must be quite edifying” (SLC 1869). The item Clemens acknowledges here probably was a clipping from the New York Evening Telegram of 30 August, calling Massett “one of our most successful lecturers” and crediting him with “a vein of thoughtfulness running through his composition” (“Journalistic Jottings,” 2, reprinting the White Plains N.Y. Eastern State Journal of 27 August; Rowell, 82). This was the sort of praise that Clemens was himself accustomed to receiving (see, for example, 6 and 7 Sept 69 to OLL, n. 8click to open link).