summer in Sweden on account of the health of Jean Clemens, and located
in London apartments--30 Wellington Court--for the winter. Then followed
a summer at beautiful Dollis Hill, an old house where Gladstone had often
visited, on a shady hilltop just outside of London. The city had not
quite enclosed the place then, and there were spreading oaks, a pond with
lily-pads, and wide spaces of grassy lawn. The place to-day is converted
into a public garden called Gladstone Park. Writing to Twichell in
mid-summer, Clemens said:

"I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I
am working, and deep in the luxury of it. But there is one
tremendous defect. Levy is all so enchanted with the place and so
in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear
herself away from it."

However, there was one still greater attraction than Dollis Hill, and
that was America--home. Mark Twain at sixty-five and a free man once
more had decided to return to his native land. They closed Dollis Hill
at the end of September, and October 6, 1900, sailed on the Minnehaha for
New York, bidding good-by, as Mark Twain believed, and hoped, to foreign
travel. Nine days later, to a reporter who greeted him on the ship, he
said:

"If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I can't
get away again."

LV.

A PROPHET AT HOME

New York tried to outdo Vienna and London in honoring Mark Twain. Every
newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and
his triumph. "He had behaved like Walter Scott," writes Howells, "as
millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott behaved till
they knew it was like Clemens." Clubs and societies vied with one
another in offering him grand entertainments. Literary and lecture
proposals poured in. He was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for
his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures.

These sensational offers did not tempt him. He was sick of the platform.
He made a dinner speech here and there--always an event--but he gave no
lectures or readings for profit. His literary work he confined to a few
magazines, and presently concluded an arrangement with "Harper &
Brothers" for whatever he might write, the payment to be twenty (later
thirty) cents per word. He arranged with the same firm for the
publication of all his books, by this time collected in uniform edition.
He wished his affairs to be settle