1 Clemens intended his enclosed manuscript to be inserted in the final installment of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” forthcoming in the January 1878 Atlantic Monthly. The proposed addition was “The Invalid’s Story,” about a mix-up involving a corpse in a coffin, a crate of rifles, and “a box of very eloquent Limburger cheese.” Howells rejected it. In 1879 Clemens meant to use it in A Tramp Abroad, but refrained, again on advice from Howells (30 Jan 1879 to Howells, Letters 1876–1880). Finally, in 1882, he inserted a revised version of it in “Some Rambling Notes” when he included that series in The Stolen White Elephant, reporting that it had been left out of the Atlantic printing “because it was feared that the story was not true, and at that time there was no way of proving that it was not” (SLC 1877–82; SLC 1882b, 94–95).

2 In a letter dated 29 October 1877, printed in the Hartford Times on 31 October (“Ending Mark Twain’s ‘Captain’s Story,’ in His Trip to the Bermudas, No. II”). Frank Jewett, of Simsbury, Connecticut tried “to make amends” for Clemens’s alleged “short-comings” in the second installment of “Some Rambling Notes,” in the November issue of the Atlantic. Claiming to have sailed from Boston in 1843 in a “staunch barque” under the command of Captain “Hurricane” Jones—the fictional mariner featured in Twain’s sketch, based on the prototype of Captain Edgar Wakeman—Jewett corroborated the captain’s penchant for offering inventive explanations of Biblical miracles, but insisted that “Mark did not ‘tell it all.’” According to Jewett, Jones often told the story of Isaac and the prophets of Baal in conjunction with that of Daniel in the lions’ den; the Atlantic sketch, however, included only the former. Jewett’s long-winded rendition of the Daniel story in the Times closely paralleled the version told with greater economy and skill by Wakeman in his memoir, The Log of an Ancient Mariner (Wakeman 1878, 253–54), confirming Jewett’s claim that he had heard the captain tell it firsthand.

3 The Howellses were in Hartford from 25 to 27 October (25 or 26 Oct? 1877 to Elinor Howells, n. 1). Howells made a second visit, with his daughter Winifred, staying with the Clemenses from 11 to around 15 December. While there he lectured twice, first on Gibbon in Seminary Hall on Wednesday, 12 December, then on Venice the following morning, at a special meeting of the Saturday Morning Club, Clemens’s young women’s group (Howells to SLC, 23 Nov 1877, CU-MARK; MTHL, 1:209–10).

4 In early October 1877 the New York financial community was stunned by the revelation that William C. Gilman (1833–1922), a highly regarded insurance broker, was guilty of forgery. Gilman, who for years had been living beyond his income, “raised” the denominations of insurance and bank stock certificates and then used them as collateral for loans totaling more than $200,000, which he could not repay. On 12 October, after several days in hiding, Gilman surrendered and confessed. Immediately convicted, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment at hard labor (New York Times: “Vast Forgeries Exposed,” 3 Oct 1877, 1; “The Gilman Forgeries,” 4 Oct 1877, 5; “W. C. Gilman Indicted,” 12 Oct 1877, 8; “The Story of Gilman,” 13 Oct 1877, 4). The case was of special interest in the Clemens household because Gilman’s wife, Catherine (1836–79), was the sister of Clemens’s lawyer, Charles E. Perkins, and the niece of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. She was admitted to the Hartford Retreat for the Insane after her delusion that “her husband’s trouble was a great mistake” became a “mania,” and at last she “became so violent” that her physician and friends “were compelled to place her under restraint” (“Results of Gilman’s Crime,” New York Tribune, 22 Oct 1877, 2; “Nook Farm Genealogy” 1974, 5, 7, 22). Although she was released after several months, she never recovered completely, and died on 1 December 1879. Her husband’s sentence was commuted shortly thereafter, in time for him to attend her funeral (“Gilman, the Forger, Free,” New York Sun, 4 Dec 1879, 1).