But a doubt has lately sprung up in my mind. I live eight miles from Printing House Square; the Times leaves that point at 4 o'clock in the morning, by mail, and reaches me at 5 in the afternoon, thus making the trip in thirteen hours.
It is my conviction that in New York we should do it in eleven.
C. DOLLIS HILL, N. W.
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
DOLLIS HILL HOUSE, KILBURN, N. W. LONDON, Aug. 12, '00. DEAR JOE,--The Sages Prof. Fiske and Brander Matthews were out here to tea a week ago and it was a breath of American air to see them. We furnished them a bright day and comfortable weather--and they used it all up, in their extravagant American way. Since then we have sat by coal fires, evenings.
We shall sail for home sometime in October, but shall winter in New York where we can have an osteopath of good repute to continue the work of putting this family in proper condition.
Livy and I dined with the Chief justice a month ago and he was as well- conditioned as an athlete.
It is all China, now, and my sympathies are with the Chinese. They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptred thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all the foreigners out and keep them out for good. I only wish it; of course I don't really expect it.
Why, hang it, it occurs to me that by the time we reach New York you Twichells will be invading Europe and once more we shall miss the connection. This is thoroughly exasperating. Aren't we ever going to meet again? With no end of love from all of us, MARK.
P. S. Aug. 18. DEAR JOE,--It is 7.30 a. m. I have been waking very early, lately. If it occurs once more, it will be habit; then I will submit and adopt it.
This is our day of mourning. It is four years since Susy died; it is five years and a month that I saw her alive for the last time-throwing kisses at us from the railway platform when we started West around the world.
Sometimes it is a century; sometimes it was yesterday. With love MARK.
We discover in the foregoing letter that the long European residence was drawing to an end. More than nine years had passed since the closing of the Hartford house--eventful years that had seen failure, bereavement, battle with debt, and rehabilitated fortunes. All the family were anxious to get home--Mark Twain most anxious of all.
They closed Dollis Hill House near the end of September, and put up for a brief period at a family hotel, an amusing picture of which follows.
To J. Y. M. MacAlister, in London:
Sep. 1900. MY DEAR MACALISTER,--We do really start next Saturday. I meant to sail earlier, but waited to finish some studies of what are called Family Hotels. They are a London specialty, God has not permitted them to exist elsewhere; they are ramshackle clubs which were dwellings at the time of the Heptarchy. Dover and Albemarle Streets are filled with them. The once spacious rooms are split up into coops which afford as much discomfort as can be had anywhere out of jail for any money. All the modern inconveniences are furnished, and some that have been obsolete for a century. The prices are astonishingly high for what you get. The bedrooms are hospitals for incurable furniture. I find it so in this one. They exist upon a tradition; they represent the vanishing home-like inn of fifty years ago, and are mistaken by foreigners for it. Some quite respectable Englishmen still frequent them through inherited habit and arrested development; many Americans also, through ignorance and superstition. The rooms are as interesting as the Tower of London, but older I think. Older and dearer. The lift was a gift of William the Conqueror, some of the beds are prehistoric.