come all the way from India to see Mark
Twain.

Hartford had its own literary group. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived
near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner. The Clemens and
Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age,
published in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark
Twain. The character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become
immortal, and it is a character that only Mark Twain could create, for,
though drawn from his mother's cousin, James Lampton, it embodies--and
in no very exaggerated degree--characteristics that were his own. The
tendency to make millions was always imminent; temptation was always
hard to resist. Money-making schemes are continually being placed before
men of means and prominence, and Mark Twain, to the day of his death,
found such schemes fatally attractive.

It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in
a typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars
and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by. It was because of this
characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser
importance, but no less disastrous in the end. His one successful
commercial venture was his association with Charles L. Webster in the
publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to
pay a royalty of more than four hundred thousand dollars to Grant's
widow--the largest royalty ever paid from any single publication.
It saved the Grant family from poverty. Yet even this triumph was a
misfortune to Mark Twain, for it led to scores of less profitable book
ventures and eventual disaster.

Meanwhile he had written and published a number of books. Tom Sawyer,
The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn,
and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court were among the volumes
that had entertained the world and inspired it with admiration and love
for their author. In 1878-79 he had taken his family to Europe, where
they spent their time in traveling over the Continent. It was during
this period that he was joined by his intimate friend, the Rev. Joseph
H. Twichell, of Hartford, and the two made a journey, the story of which
is told in A Tramp Abroad.

In 1891 the Hartford house was again closed, this time indefinitely,
and the family, now five in number, took up residence in Berlin. The
typesetting-machine and the unfortunate publishing venture were drawing
heavily on the famil