It is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a tempering influence on Mark Twain’s nature.  Instead of becoming harsh and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly.  He wrote often to Hall, always considerately, even tenderly.  Once, when something in Hall’s letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote: 

Mrs. Clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks I have been blaming you or finding fault with you about something.  But most assuredly that cannot be.  I tell her that although I am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other people I am not a bit likely to write such things to you.  I can’t believe I have done anything so ungrateful.  If I have, pile coals of fire upon my head for I deserve it.  You have done magnificently with the business, & we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for all that labor.

He was fond of Hall.  He realized how honest and resolute and industrious he had been.  In another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had been able to “keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and fleets go down”; and he added:  “Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what little relief is in our power.”

The type-setter situation seemed to promise something.  In fact, the machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation.  The new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way:  About the middle of March Clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts which he had written at odd times and forwarded them to Hall, in the hope that they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his arrival; and a week later, March 22, 1893, he sailed from Genoa on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, a fine, new boat.  One of the manuscripts was ’The Californian’s Tale’ and the other was ’Adam’s Diary’.—­[It seems curious that neither of these tales should have found welcome with the magazines.  “The Californian’s Tale” was published in the Liber Scriptorum, an Authors’ Club book, edited by Arthur Stedman.  The ‘Diary’ was disposed of to the Niagara Book, a souvenir of Niagara Falls, which contained sketches by Howells, Clemens, and others.  Harper’s Magazine republished both these stories in later years—­the Diary especially with great success.]

Some joke was likely to be played on Mark Twain during these ocean journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned.  They knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with dutiable goods and held up in the Custom House, and they planned for this effect.  A few days before arriving in New York one passenger after another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that they would be remembered in absence,