As to the "Christmas hope" and the inventor of the telephone, see the letter of explanation that Clemens wrote to Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner G. Hubbard, dated 27 December 1890. Scans of the letter are online from the Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/004039.html "A Christmas Hope" had been published a few days earlier in the New York _World_ on 25 Dec. 1890. (See Camfield's bibliography in the _Oxford Companion to Mark Twain_.) Barb