February 21 Thursday – This announcement appeared in the editorial column of Street and Smith’s New York Weekly, p. 4:
We are happy to announce that we have made an engagement with the celebrated “Mark Twain,” the California wit and humorist, who will furnish us with a series of his inimitable papers. “Mark Twain” stands a head and shoulders above most of the humorous writers of the day, and his contributions to our columns cannot fail to give the most complete satisfaction. Mark informs us that he is about to deliver in this city his great lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which for a series of nights crowded the largest lecture room in San Francisco to suffocation. He cannot help succeeding here, and we bespeak for him, in advance, full houses and “a pile of rocks.”
Note: The Weekly ran five of Sam’s early letters to the Sacramento Union, probably to stir up interest in the Frog book and for advertising the forthcoming New York lectures. The Weekly was “a shrewdly conducted periodical quite hospitable to humorous writers [and] seems to have been the first eastern publication to capitalize on Mark Twain’s growing popularity in the late sixties by publishing a connected series of his writings” [The Twainian, Mar. 1944 p1-2].