While vacationing in Venice during the early summer of 1894, Henry James wrote to his friend Edmund Gosse on June 25th. Alluding to his own return to England and Gosse’s forthcoming trip to the continent James discussed his future plans as follows:

The blaze of summer is upon us and I shall presently edge away from the fire. I leave this place July 1st & return to England by the 25th. I hope this will be in time to put a little salt on your tail before you fly away. No offence meant—it is the way we talk to a singing-bird, as Torwald Ibsen would say.

This, in any case, is how the passage is reproduced in Rayburn Moore’s clear-text edition of James’s letters to Gosse. 2 Yet an examination of the manuscript of the letter, which has long been part of Adeline Tintner’s collection now donated to the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, shows that in the third sentence of this passage James began to write: “I hope this will be in time to put my hand.” The manuscript also shows that he crossed out the word “hand,” but not “my,” wrote “a little” above the canceled “hand,” and then completed the sentence. In the manuscript, then, the sentence reads: “I hope this will be in time to put my hand ^a little^ salt on your tail.”