emens, in September, he wrote:

Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him
word once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no
time to spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast
enough with work.

In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer
to have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London
in the spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He
felt that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only
just begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him.
To his mother and sister, in November, he wrote:

I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel
entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make
after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last
night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and
Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.

All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver
a gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage
Club,--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic
speech made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will
find it in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking
the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair,
rural aspects, he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:

If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
nature.

And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
British Museum that