Their ship was the Gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the opposite side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain, standing on deck, saw for the third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow:  a complete arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different from a day rainbow.  It is not given to many persons in this world to see even one of these phenomena.  After each previous vision there had come to him a period of good-fortune.  Perhaps this also boded well for him.

CXXII

AN INTERLUDE

The Gallia reached New York September 3, 1879.  A report of his arrival, in the New York Sun, stated that Mark Twain had changed in his absence; that only his drawl seemed natural.

His hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming Cunarder, Gallia, was of the pattern that English officers wear in India, and his suit of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store.  He looked older than when he went to Germany, and his hair has turned quite gray.

It was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and Clemens, anxious to get through the Custom House, urged the inspector to accept his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the baggage.  But the official was dubious.  Clemens argued eloquently, and a higher authority was consulted.  Again Clemens stated his case and presented his arguments.  A still higher chief of inspection was summoned, evidently from his bed.  He listened sleepily to the preamble, then suddenly said:  “Oh, chalk his baggage, of course!  Don’t you know it’s Mark Twain and that he’ll talk all night?”

They went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had been longing through all their days of absence.  Mrs. Clemens, in her letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop.  From his accustomed study-table Clemens wrote to Twichell: 

“You have run about a good deal, Joe, but you have never seen any place that was so divine as the farm.  Why don’t you come here and take a foretaste of Heaven?” Clemens declared he would roam no more forever, and settled down to the happy farm routine.  He took up his work, which had not gone well in Paris, and found his interest in it renewed.  In the letter to Twichell he said: 

I am revising my Ms. I did not expect to like it, but I do.  I have been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process.  Day before yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them, reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now I think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt.  I believe it will be a readable book of travels.  I cannot see that it lacks anything but information.

Mrs. Clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband.  Yet she had enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his.  Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond all counting.