health. Furthermore, the maintenance of the
Hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective
income. The house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years
must be closed. A great period had ended.

They arranged to sail on the 6th of June by the French line.--[On the
Gascogne.]--Mrs. Crane was to accompany them, and came over in April to
help in breaking the news to the servants. John and Ellen O'Neill (the
gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for
George and Patrick. Katie Leary was retained to accompany the family. It
was a sad dissolution.

The day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. Mrs.
Clemens did not come immediately. She was looking into the rooms,
bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its
memories. Following the others she entered the carriage, and Patrick
McAleer drove them together for the last time. They were going on a long
journey. They did not guess how long, or that the place would never be
home to them again.

CLXXVI

A EUROPEAN SUMMER

They landed at Havre and went directly to Paris, where they remained
about a week. From Paris Clemens wrote to Hall that a deal by which he
had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the Mallorys, of
the Churchman, had fallen through.

"Therefore," he said, "you will have to modify your instalment system to
meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to
borrow any more money I would not know how or where to raise it."

The Clemens party went to Geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of
Aix; from Aix to Bayreuth to attend the Wagner festival, and from
Bayreuth to Marienbad for further additions of health. Clemens began
writing his newspaper letters at Aix, the first of which consists of
observations at that "paradise of rheumatics." This letter is really a
careful and faithful description of Aix-les-Bains, with no particular
drift of humor in it. He tells how in his own case the baths at first
developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all
of it.

"I've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and I am going away
now," he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and
scenery about Aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little Lake
Bourget and the happy excursions to Annecy.

At the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old
crooked lane