But there is one
tremendous defect. Levy is all so enchanted with the place and so
in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear
herself away from it."
However, there was one still greater attraction than Dollis Hill, and
that was America--home. Mark Twain at sixty-five and a free man once
more had decided to return to his native land. They closed Dollis Hill
at the end of September, and October 6, 1900, sailed on the Minnehaha for
New York, bidding good-by, as Mark Twain believed, and hoped, to foreign
travel. Nine days later, to a reporter who greeted him on the ship, he
said:
"If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I can't
get away again."
LV.
A PROPHET AT HOME
New York tried to outdo Vienna and London in honoring Mark Twain. Every
newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and
his triumph. "He had behaved like Walter Scott," writes Howells, "as
millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott behaved till
they knew it was like Clemens." Clubs and societies vied with one
another in offering him grand entertainments. Literary and lecture
proposals poured in. He was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for
his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures.
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