Soon after, he wrote a letter to his younger son, then a small boy.  It told of a pleasant drive to the Rhine, a few miles away.  He concludes:  “It was all very wonderful, but Papa thought after all he was glad his boys live in a country that is as yet pure and sweet and good—­not in one where every field seems to cry out with the remembrance of bloodshed and wrong, and where so many people have lived and suffered that tonight, under this clear moon, their very ghosts seemed to throng the road and dispute our right of way.  Be thankful, my dear boy, that you are an American.  Papa was never so fond of his country before as in this land that has been so great, powerful, and so very hard and wicked.”

In May, 1880, he was made Consul at Glasgow, a position that he filled for five years.  During this period he spent a considerable part of his time in London and in visiting at country homes.  He lectured and wrote and made many friends, among the most valued of whom were William Black and Walter Besant.

A new administration came in with 1885 and Harte was superseded.  He went to London and settled down to a simple and regular life.  For ten years he lived with the Van de Veldes, friends of long standing.  He wrote with regularity and published several volumes of stories and sketches.  In 1885 Harte visited Switzerland.  Of the Alps he wrote:  “In spite of their pictorial composition I wouldn’t give a mile of the dear old Sierras, with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for a hundred thousand kilometers of the picturesque Vaud.”

Of Geneva he wrote:  “I thought I should not like it, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau and the De Staels, still lingered.”  But he did like it, and wrote brilliantly of Lake Leman and Mont Blanc.

Returning to his home in Aldershot he resumed work, giving some time to a libretto for a musical comedy, but his health was failing and he accomplished little.  A surgical operation for cancer of the throat in March, 1902, afforded a little relief, but he worked with difficulty.  On April 17th he began a new story, “A Friend of Colonel Starbottle.”  He wrote one sentence and began another; but the second sentence was his last work, though a few letters to friends bear a later date.  On May 5th, sitting at his desk, there came a hemorrhage of the throat, followed later in the day by a second, which left him unconscious.  Before the end of the day he peacefully breathed his last.

Pathetic and inexplicable were the closing days of this gifted man.  An exile from his native land, unattended by family or kin, sustaining his lonely life by wringing the dregs of memory, and clasping in farewell the hands of a fancied friend of his dear old reprobate Colonel, he, like Kentuck, “drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea.”