He was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now until the end.  He no longer had any serious financial qualms.  He could afford to be independent.  He refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was aware that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions.  He declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted.  He declined lecture propositions from Pond at the rate of about one a month.  He could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some remnants of self-respect.  In a letter to Rogers he said: 

Pond offers me $10,000 for 10 nights, but I do not feel strongly tempted.  Mrs. Clemens ditto.

Early in 1899 he wrote to Howells that Mrs. Clemens had proved to him that they owned a house and furniture in Hartford, that his English and American copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand dollars’ accumulation in the bank.

“I have been out and bought a box of 6c. cigars,” he says; “I was smoking 4 1/2c. before.”

The things that men are most likely to desire had come to Mark Twain, and no man was better qualified to rejoice in them.  That supreme, elusive thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for the tragedy of human bereavement and the torture of human ills.  That he did rejoice —­reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors paid him, and in all that gay Viennese life-there is no doubt.  He could wave aside care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it seemed; but in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way and they waited by his path.  Once, after reciting his occupations and successes, he wrote: 

All these things might move and interest one.  But how, desperately more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of ‘At the Back of the North Wind’.  Oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!...  Death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us others & will not look our way.

And to Twichell a few days later: 

    A Hartford with no Susy in it—­& no Ned Bunce!—­It is not the city
    of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak....  It seems only a few
    weeks since I saw Susy last—­yet that was 1895 & this is 1899....

My work does not go well to-day.  It failed yesterday—­& the day before & the day before that.  And so I have concluded to put the Ms. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject.  I was trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an official dress for them to wear.