第235章

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 Ithink 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.

End Letters Vol.5

by Mark Twain VOLUME V.

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1901-1906