Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK), which in part replied to his of 12 May:

With his letter Howells enclosed proofsheets of the final installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Clemens did not quite delete “all about the songs,” but retained a few very brief allusions to singing aboard steamboats. Howells evidently did not approve of the added “postscript” explaining the seemingly sudden end of the series. The article concluded instead with a lengthy anecdote about Strother Wiley (“Stephen”), introduced as follows: “In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this series of Old Mississippi articles with one more reminiscence of wayward, careless, ingenious ‘Stephen,’ whom I described in a former paper” (SLC 1875, 194). (It is unlikely that this reminiscence was the postscript, as previously suggested: see MTHL , 1:85 n. 2.) A discussion about a suitable ending and some consequent revision, possibly including addition of the entire Wiley anecdote, doubtless was the reason that publication was delayed. If Howells had accepted Clemens’s 22 May alterations, including the postscript, the typesetting and printing could have been completed well before 12 June, when the July Atlantic was available (“The July Atlantic,” Hartford Courant, 12 June 75, 2). On 7 June, however, Clemens was again reworking this last installment, and Howells had postponed publication until August (see 7 June 75 to Howellsclick to open link).

Harte was in Hartford on 18 May. Twichell, in his journal entry about that day’s baseball game (see the previous letter, n. 1), noted: “On the way to this match we met Mr Bliss with Bret Harte going to look at a house which the latter thinks of renting. I had never seen him ‘close to’ before and was a little disappointed in his looks” (Twichell, 1:102). His disappointment may have been in part evoked by a conversation that he, and possibly Clemens, had recently had with Bliss. In his journal entry for 13 May, Twichell noted that he and Clemens had spent that afternoon in New Haven,

The book, published in 1876 by the American Publishing Company, was Gabriel Conroy (see 5 July 75 to Howells, n. 4click to open link, and, for details of Bliss’s difficulties with Harte, L5 , 134–35 n. 2). In addition to house hunting with Bliss, Harte probably requested one of the periodic advance royalty payments he depended on to meet his expenses. He did not rent a house in Hartford, however, but continued living with his family in Morristown, New Jersey, at a hotel kept by his brother-in-law, while traveling frequently to New York. In July the Hartes moved to Cohasset, Massachusetts, near the actor Stuart Robson, for whom Harte had agreed to write a comedy, Two Men of Sandy Bar (Scharnhorst 1992, 49–50, 53; Harte 1997, 110–14). Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–99), was America’s first professor of paleontology, holding that chair at Yale from 1866 until his death.