It was decided to vacate the house in Tedworth Square and go to Switzerland for the summer.  Mrs. Crane and Charles Langdon’s daughter, Julia, joined them early in July, and they set out for Switzerland a few days later.  Just before leaving, Clemens received an offer from Pond of fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the platform in America.  It was too great a temptation to resist at once, and they took it under advisement.  Clemens was willing to accept, but Mrs. Clemens opposed the plan.  She thought his health no longer equal to steady travel.  She believed that with continued economy they would be able to manage their problem without this sum.  In the end the offer was declined.

They journeyed to Switzerland by way of Holland and Germany, the general destination being Lucerne.  They did not remain there, however.  They found a pretty little village farther up the lake—­Weggis, at the foot of the Rigi—­where, in the Villa Buhlegg, they arranged for the summer at very moderate rates indeed.  Weggis is a beautiful spot, looking across the blue water to Mount Pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white villages.  Down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage—­for it was scarcely a villa except by courtesy—­there was a little inclosure, and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where Clemens often sat to rest and smoke.  The fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded.  A small tablet has engraved upon it “Mark Twain Ruhe.”  Farther along the shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly working-people agreed to rent him an upper room for a study.  It was a sunny room with windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there steadily.  To Twichell he wrote: 

This is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and new inventions.  We shall always come here for the summers if we can.

The others have climbed the Rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if Twichell will come and climb it with him.  They had climbed it together during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before.

He was full of enthusiasm over his work.  To F. H. Skrine, in London, he wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his note-book contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he proposed to write.

But of the books begun that summer at Weggis none appears to have been completed.  There still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about Tom and Huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and there is the tale already mentioned, the “dream” story; and another tale with a plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the burning title of “Hell-Fire Hotchkiss”—­a, story of Hannibal life—­and some short stories.  Clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction.  Perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention.  He realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and one after another he dropped them.  The fact that proofs of the big book were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative faculty.