Richardson, cut beneath them. The word "southern" in the original
read "northern," as in Australia, the warm wind is from the north.
Richardson died in England in 1901.]

CXCIV

WINTER IN TEDWORTH SQUARE

Mrs. Clemens, Clara, and Jean, with Katie Leary, sailed for England
without delay. Arriving there, they gave up the house in Guildford, and
in a secluded corner of Chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown
Tedworth Square (No. 23), they hid themselves away for the winter. They
did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known
except to a few of their closest friends. They wanted to be alone with
their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. Perhaps not a
dozen people in London knew their address and the outside world was
ignorant of it altogether. It was through this that a wild report
started that Mark Twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in
poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. This report--exploited
in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period
received wide attention.

James Ross Clemens, of the St. Louis branch, a nephew of Frau von Versen,
was in London just then, and wrote at once, through Chatto & Windus,
begging Mark Twain to command his relative's purse. The reply to this
kind offer was an invitation to tea, and "Young Doctor Jim," as he was
called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but
in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. The general
impression survived, however, that Mark Twain was sorely pressed, and the
New York Herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his
debts. The Herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account,
and Andrew Carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise
was barely under way when Clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which
he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being
weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he
was able to take care of them through his own efforts.

Meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for October
24, 1896, says:

"Wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'Around the World'."

He worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though
his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual
heresies. His series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death
of Susy, had tended to solidify his attitud