s own country had he won such a complete triumph. He was the
talk of the streets. The papers were full of him. The "London Times"
declared his lectures had only whetted the public appetite for more. His
manager, George Dolby (formerly manager for Charles Dickens), urged him
to remain and continue the course through the winter. Clemens finally
agreed that he would take his family back to America and come back
himself within the month. This plan he carried out. Returning to
London, he lectured steadily for two months in the big Hanover Square
rooms, giving his "Roughing It" address, and it was only toward the end
that his audience showed any sign of diminishing. There is probably no
other such a lecture triumph on record.

Mark Twain was at the pinnacle of his first glory: thirty-six, in full
health, prosperous, sought by the world's greatest, hailed in the highest
places almost as a king. Tom Sawyer's dreams of greatness had been all
too modest. In its most dazzling moments his imagination had never led
him so far.

XXXV.

BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"

It was at the end of January, 1874, when Mark Twain returned to America.
His reception abroad had increased his prestige at home. Howells and
Aldrich came over from Boston to tell him what a great man he had become
--to renew those Boston days of three years before--to talk and talk of
all the things between the earth and sky. And Twichell came in, of
course, and Warner, and no one took account of time, or hurried, or
worried about anything at all.

"We had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round,"
wrote Howells, long after, and he tells how he and Aldrich were so
carried away with Clemens's success in subscription publication that on
the way back to Boston they planned a book to sell in that way. It was
to be called "Twelve Memorable Murders," and they had made two or three
fortunes from it by the time they reached Boston.

"But the project ended there. We never killed a single soul," Howells
once confessed to the writer of this memoir.

At Quarry Farm that summer Mark Twain began the writing of "The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer." He had been planning for some time to set
down the story of those far-off days along the river-front at Hannibal,
with John Briggs, Tom Blankenship, and the rest of that graceless band,
and now in the cool luxury of a little study which Mrs. Crane had built
for him on the hillside he set himself to spin the fabric of