achine, no
penny of which would ever be returned. Outside capital to carry on the
enterprise was promised, but it failed him. Still believing that there
were "millions in it," he realized that for the present, at least, he
could do no more.

Two things were clear: he must fall back on authorship for revenue, and
he must retrench. In the present low stage of his fortunes he could no
longer afford to live in the Hartford house. He decided to take the
family abroad, where living was cheaper, and where he might be able to
work with fewer distractions.

He began writing at a great rate articles and stories for the magazines.
He hunted out the old play he had written with Howells long before, and
made a book of it, "The American Claimant." Then, in June, 1891, they
closed the beautiful Hartford house, where for seventeen years they had
found an ideal home; where the children had grown through their sweet,
early life; where the world's wisest had come and gone, pausing a little
to laugh with the world's greatest merrymaker. The furniture was
shrouded, the curtains drawn, the light shut away.

While the carriage was waiting, Mrs. Clemens went back and took a last
look into each of the rooms, as if bidding a kind of good-by to the past.
Then she entered the carriage, and Patrick McAleer, who had been with
Mark Twain and his wife since their wedding-day, drove them to the
station for the last time.

Mark Twain had a contract for six newspaper letters at one thousand
dollars each. He was troubled with rheumatism in his arm, and wrote his
first letter from Aix-les-Bains, a watering-place--a "health-factory," as
he called it--and another from Marienbad. They were in Germany in
August, and one day came to Heidelberg, where they occupied their old
apartment of thirteen years before, room forty, in the Schloss Hotel,
with its far prospect of wood and hill, the winding Neckar, and the blue,
distant valley of the Rhine. Then, presently, they came to Switzerland,
to Ouchy-Lausanne, by lovely Lake Geneva, and here Clemens left the
family and, with a guide and a boatman, went drifting down the Rhone in a
curious, flat-bottomed craft, thinking to find material for one or more
articles, possibly for a book. But drifting down that fair river through
still September days, past ancient, drowsy villages, among sloping
vineyards, where grapes were ripening in the tranquil sunlight, was too
restful and soothing for work. In a letter home, he wr