August 17th.  The Reformed Statesman growling and complaining again —­not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the Commodore, while letting on to be talking to himself.  This time he was dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date, untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn’t begin with the Waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc.

    But he was not allowed to finish.  We put him ashore at Portland.

That is to say, Reed landed at Portland, the rest of the party returning with the yacht.

“We had a noble good time in the yacht,” Clemens wrote Twichell on their return.  “We caught a Chinee missionary and drowned him.”

Twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was to make him feel sorry he had not accepted.

CCXVI

RIVERDALE—­A YALE DEGREE

The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street.  They spent a week in Elmira at the end of September, and after a brief stop in New York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home.  They had permanently concluded not to return to Hartford.  They had put the property there into an agent’s hands for sale.  Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the house again.

They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration.  They decided that they must have easy access to the New York center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and light.  The Appleton homestead provided these things.  It was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the Morris family, so long prominent in New York history.  On passing into the Appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named “Holbrook Hall.”  It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades.  It had associations:  the Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the publishing firm.  The great hall of the added wing was its chief feature.  Clemens once remembered: 

“We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it.”

There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home there might have been ideal.  They loved the place presently, so much so that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly.  They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson shore.  They were anxious to have a home again—­one that they could call their own.