Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in Philadelphia, but without result.  He did lecture two nights in Steinway Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity.  Father Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering for lack of funds.  Some of his people were actually without food, he said, their children crying with hunger.  No one ever responded to an appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens.  He offered to deliver a lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the project.  He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon it.  It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.

He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.  Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he urged annexation.

“We must annex those people,” he declared, and proceeded to specify the blessings we could give them, such as “leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed Ring.”

    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train. 
    We can give them lecturers!  I will go myself.

    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
    civilization.  Annexation is what the poor islanders need!

    “Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”

His success in England became an incentive to certain American institutions to recognize his gifts at home.  Early in the year he was dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later elected to its membership.  This was but a beginning.  Some new membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets that he finally invented a set form for declining them.  He was not yet recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or but little later, said: 

“Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past fifty years.”  So he was beginning to be “discovered” in high places.

It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those earliest days of marriage.  The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place.  The little family had comparatively good health.  Their old friends were stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones.  Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls—­all certain of a welcome there.  George Warner, only a little while ago, remembering, said: