They passed that winter in London, where he worked at the story of his travels, Following the Equator, the proofs of which he read the next summer in Switzerland.  The returns from it, and from his reading venture, wiped away Mark Twain’s indebtedness and made him free.  He could go back to America; as he said, able to look any man in the face again.

Yet he did not go immediately.  He could live more economically abroad, and economy was still necessary.  The family spent two winters in Vienna, and their apartments there constituted a veritable court where the world’s notables gathered.  Another winter in England followed, and then, in the latter part of 1900, they went home—­that is, to America.  Mrs. Clemens never could bring herself to return to Hartford, and never saw their home there again.

Mark Twain’s return to America, was in the nature of a national event.  Wherever he appeared throngs turned out to bid him welcome.  Mighty banquets were planned in his honor.

In a house at 14 West Tenth Street, and in a beautiful place at Riverdale, on the Hudson, most of the next three years were passed.  Then Mrs. Clemens’s health failed, and in the autumn of 1903 the family went to Florence for her benefit.  There, on the 5th of June, 1904, she died.  They brought her back and laid her beside Susy, at Elmira.  That winter the family took up residence at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York, and remained there until the completion of Stormfield, at Redding, Connecticut, in 1908.

In his later life Mark Twain was accorded high academic honors.  Already, in 1888, he had received from Yale College the degree of Master of Arts, and the same college made him a Doctor of Literature in 1901.  A year later the university of his own State, at Columbia, Missouri, conferred the same degree, and then, in 1907, came the crowning honor, when venerable Oxford tendered him the doctor’s robe.

“I don’t know why they should give me a degree like that,” he said, quaintly.  “I never doctored any literature—­I wouldn’t know how.”

He had thought never to cross the ocean again, but he declared he would travel to Mars and back, if necessary, to get that Oxford degree.  He appreciated its full meaning-recognition by the world’s foremost institution of learning of the achievements of one who had no learning of the institutionary kind.  He sailed in June, and his sojourn in England was marked by a continuous ovation.  His hotel was besieged by callers.  Two secretaries were busy nearly twenty hours a day attending to visitors and mail.  When he appeared on the street his name went echoing in every direction and the multitudes gathered.  On the day when he rose, in his scarlet robe and black mortar-board, to receive his degree (he must have made a splendid picture in that dress, with his crown of silver hair), the vast assembly went wild.  What a triumph, indeed, for the little Missouri printer-boy!  It was the climax of a great career.