ford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father
Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was
suffering for lack of funds. Some of his people were actually without
food, he said, their children crying with hunger. No one ever responded
to an appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to
deliver a lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever
expenses were incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in
forwarding the project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the
close of it a large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts
printed upon it. It was held up to view, and the house broke into a
storm of cheers.

He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
urged annexation.

"We must annex those people," he declared, and proceeded to specify
the blessings we could give them, such as "leather-headed juries, the
insanity law, and the Tweed Ring."

We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.

We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!

"Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"

His success in England became an incentive to certain American
institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was
dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two
later elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new
membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets
that he finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet
recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he
had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or
but little later, said:

"Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his
real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
fifty years." So he was beginning to be "discovered" in high places.

It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since
those earliest days of marriage. The