Clemens’s thanks may have been for Redpath’s efforts in promoting Roughing It to the Boston press. On 1 May an appreciative review in the Boston Evening Transcript pointed out the “serious side to Mark Twain’s genius” and praised the book’s “eloquent and almost poetical” descriptions and masterful character sketches (“Mark Twain’s New Book,” 3; (20 Apr 72 to Redpathclick to open link; RI 1993 , 887).

Ellen Louise Chandler Moulton (1835–1908) began her literary career at an early age, publishing her first collection of sketches and poems in 1854. After her marriage in 1855 to William U. Moulton (d. 1898), a Boston journalist and publisher, she lived in Boston, where her Friday gatherings attracted luminaries of art, music, and literature. A frequent contributor to literary journals, she achieved a notable success with the first of several volumes of juvenile literature, Bed-Time Stories, in 1873. She was well respected as the Tribune’s Boston literary correspondent from 1870 to 1876. Extracts from her letters “were copied all over the United States, and they came to be looked upon as a sort of authorized report of what was doing in the intellectual capital of the country” (Whiting 1910, 58).

Redpath may have given Moulton this note as well: it was later laid into her half-morocco copy of Roughing It (see the textual commentary).