Clemens left London on 7 or 8 January for Leicester, where he delivered his Sandwich Islands lecture and read the “Jumping Frog” story at Temperance Hall on the evening of 8 January (lecture announcement broadside, CtHMTH). The Java (a Cunard steamship, like the Parthia) left Liverpool for New York on 10 January; Clemens’s luncheon host has not been identified among the passengers (“Cunard Line,” London Times, 10 Jan 74, 2; “Passengers Arrived,” New York Tribune, 24 Jan 74, 5).

All of the revisions, as well as the signature, are Clemens’s.

John Murray Moore (1843?–1914), a native of Liverpool, received his medical degree in Edinburgh in 1867. Early in his career he was the medical officer for the Home for Incurables in Liverpool, and then became prominent as a physician and surgeon, practicing in Liverpool, the United States, and New Zealand. He published numerous articles on homeopathy as well as books on that and other subjects: New Zealand for the Emigrant, Invalid, and Tourist (London: Sampson Low and Co., 1890); Common-sense Homœopathy (Liverpool: D. Marples and Co., 1894); The Birth of New Nations During the Victorian Reign (London, 1900); and Three Aspects of the Late Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Manchester: Marsden and Co., 1901). The last two books derived from papers written for the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, which Moore joined in 1893 and served as president in 1900 and 1901. His business with Clemens in 1874 has not been explained (“Death of Dr. J. M. Moore,” Liverpool Post and Mercury, 11 Feb 1914; clipping and other biographical information courtesy of the Liverpool Record Office).