On 26 March 2005, Tracy Wuster wrote: "Mark Twain's quote from the speech about baseball being "the very symbol ... of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!" is one of the main quotes brought up when talking about the Spalding world tour or nineteenth century baseball in general. The main image of the tour, which Twain no doubt saw at the banquet, was of the players arrayed on the Sphinx. Shelley Fishkin pointed out to me that this image is modified in an illustration from Tom Sawyer Abroad, which has Jim standing on the Sphinx." A colleague writes with a question about the Sphinx photo: I was under the impression that the famous Sphinx photo was of the 1905 champion New York Giants (managed by the formidable John McGraw, who had just won the World Series, after refusing to play in it in 1904) in Egypt. I think that the reference I recall is from a Darryl Brock book about Dummy Taylor, a deaf mute pitcher on that team. While it seems likely that every team that traveled to Egypt had their photo taken with the Sphinx, has the Spalding tour photo (1889) ever been published? It would be interesting to compare it to the image of Jim standing on the Sphinx in _Tom Sawyer Abroad_ (1894). Barb