*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
DOLLIS HILL HOUSE, KILBURN, N. W.
LONDON, Aug. 12, '00.
DEAR JOE,--The Sages Prof. Fiske and Brander Matthews were out here
to tea a week ago and it was a breath of American air to see them. We
furnished them a bright day and comfortable weather--and they used it
all up, in their extravagant American way. Since then we have sat by
coal fires, evenings.
We shall sail for home sometime in October, but shall winter in New York
where we can have an osteopath of good repute to continue the work of
putting this family in proper condition.
Livy and I dined with the Chief Justice a month ago and he was as
well-conditioned as an athlete.
It is all China, now, and my sympathies are with the Chinese. They have
been villainously dealt with by the sceptred thieves of Europe, and I
hope they will drive all the foreigners out and keep them out for good.
I only wish it; of course I don't really expect it.
Why, hang it, it occurs to me that by the time we reach New York you
Twichells will be invading Europe and once more we shall miss the
connection. This is thoroughly exasperating. Aren't we ever going to
meet again?
With no end of love from all of us,
MARK.
P. S. Aug. 18.
DEAR JOE,--It is 7.30 a. m. I have been waking very early, lately. If it
occurs once more, it will be habit; then I will submit and adopt it.
This is our day of mourning. It is four years since Susy died; it is
five years and a month that I saw her alive for the last time-throwing
kisses at us from the railway platform when we started West around the
world.
Sometimes it is a century; sometimes it was yesterday.
With love
MARK.
We discover in the foregoing letter that the long European residence
was drawing to an end. More than nine years had passed since the
closing of the Hartford house--eventful years that had seen failure,
bereavement, battle with debt, and rehabilitated fortunes. All the
family were anxious to get home--Mark Twain most anxious of all.
They closed Dollis Hill House near the end of September, and put up
for a brief period at a family hotel, an amusing picture of which
follows.
*****
To J. Y. M. MacAlister, in London:
Sep. 1900.
MY DEAR MACALISTER,--We do really start next Saturday. I meant to sail
earlier, but waited to finish some studies of what are called Family
Hotels. They are a London specialty, God has not permitted them to exist
elsewhere; they are ramshackle clubs which were dwellings at the time
of the Heptarchy. Dover and Albemarle Streets are filled with them.
The once spacious rooms are split up into coops which afford as much
discomfort as can be had anywhere out of jail for any money. All the
modern inconveniences are furnished, and some that have been obsolete
for a century. The prices are astonishingly high for what you get. The
bedrooms are hospitals for incurable furniture. I find it so in this
one. They exist upon a tradition; they represent the vanishing home-like
inn of fifty years ago, and are mistaken by foreigners for it. Some
quite respectable Englishmen still frequent them through inherited habit
and arrested development; many Americans also, through ignorance and
superstition. The rooms are as interesting as the Tower of London, but
older I think. Older and dearer. The lift was a gift of William the
Conqueror, some of the beds are prehistoric. They represent geological
periods. Mine is the oldest. It is formed in strata of Old Red
Sandstone, volcanic tufa, ignis fatuus, and bicarbonate of hornblende,
superimposed upon argillaceous shale, and contains the prints of
prehistoric man. It is in No. 149. Thousands of scientists come to see
it. They consider it holy. They want to blast out the prints but cannot.
Dynamite rebounds from it.
Finished studies and sail Saturday in Minnehaha.
Yours ever affectionately,
MARK TWAIN.
They sailed for New York October 6th, and something more than a week
later America gave them a royal welcome. The press, far and wide,
sounded Mark Twain's praises once more; dinners and receptions were
offered on every hand; editors and lecture agents clamored for him.
The family settled in the Earlington Hotel during a period of
house-hunting. They hoped eventually to return to Hartford, but
after a brief visit paid by Clemens alone to the old place he wrote:
*****
To Sylvester Baxter, in Boston:
NEW YORK, Oct. 26, 1900.
DEAR MR. BAXTER,--It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days
with you, and there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford and the
house again; but I realize that if we ever enter the house again to
live, our hearts will break. I am not sure that we shall ever be strong
enough to endure that strain.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
Mr. and Mrs. Rogers wished to have them in their neighborhood, but
the houses there were not suitable, or were too expensive. Through
Mr. Frank Doubleday they eventually found, at 14 West Tenth Street,
a large residence handsomely furnished, and this they engaged for
the winter. “We were lucky to get this big house furnished,” he
wrote MacAlister in London. “There was not another one in town
procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right--space
enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned,
great size.”
The little note that follows shows that Mark Twain had not entirely
forgotten the days of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
*****
To a Neighbor on West Tenth Street, New York:
Nov. 30.
DEAR MADAM,--I know I ought to respect my duty and perform it, but I am
weak and faithless where boys are concerned, and I can't help secretly
approving pretty bad and noisy ones, though I do object to the kind that
ring door-bells. My family try to get me to stop the boys from holding
conventions on the front steps, but I basely shirk out of it, because I
think the boys enjoy it.
My wife has been complaining to me this evening about the boys on the
front steps and under compulsion I have made some promises. But I am
very forgetful, now that I am old, and my sense of duty is getting
spongy.
Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.