Clemens and Young met in June 1867, when Young was managing editor of the New York Tribune. After Young was replaced by Whitelaw Reid in May 1869, he founded the New York Standard, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1872. During those years he also traveled in Europe on missions for the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of state. In 1872 he accepted a position as foreign correspondent for the New York Herald, reporting primarily from Paris and London ( L2 , 55 n. 5; L3 , 230 n. 6, 265 n. 1; “John Russell Young,” New York Herald, 1 May 73, 3). Edmund Hodgson Yates (1831–94) was a novelist and journalist currently on the Herald staff. Born in London, he went to work at the London post office when only sixteen; in 1862 he became head of the missing-letter department, eventually resigning his position in 1872. In the 1850s he began writing poetry, humorous sketches, farces, and theatrical criticism, and in the 1860s edited two periodicals, Temple Bar and Tinsley’s Magazine. His first novel, For Better or Worse, appeared in 1863. Between September 1872 and February 1873 he made a successful lecture tour in the United States. In April 1873 Yates and Young were assigned to report on the Vienna International Exhibition for the Herald. Clemens’s letter may well have reached Young while he was still in Austria. The Herald also sent both Yates and Clemens to write about the shah’s visit to England, which may have been the occasion of their first meeting: they were never in New York at the same time during Yates’s 1872–73 tour, and no evidence has been found that they met in London in 1872, or between 1 and 15 June 1873 (“Edmund Yates,” New York Herald, 1 May 73, 3; Yates 1885, 406–11). The text of the present fragment, allegedly written “from Brussels,” is preserved only in Yates’s footnote to his account of the shah assignment:

Yates’s report is mistaken in at least two of its details: by Clemens’s own account, he did not go to Brussels, but only to Ostend and back, on 17 and 18 June; and the reported allusion to A Tramp Abroad (1879) must have been a joking reference to The Innocents Abroad (1869) (SLC 1873). Nasr-ed-Din (1829–96), the shah of Persia since 1848, was the first Persian monarch to undertake a state visit to Europe, during which he conferred with the governments of Russia, Germany, Belgium, England, France, Austria, Italy, and Turkey. In consequence he was responsible for bringing European ideas to his country, and granted trade concessions to Britain and Russia (Annual Cyclopaedia 1873, 637).