It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on.  The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk, near and far, and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort.  Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston and New York, and every foreign notable who visited America made a pilgrimage to Hartford to see Mark Twain.  Some even went as far as Elmira, among them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a chapter of his American Notes.  Kipling declared he had come all the way from India to see Mark Twain.

Hartford had its own literary group.  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner.  The Clemens and Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age, published in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark Twain.  The character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become immortal, and it is a character that only Mark Twain could create, for, though drawn from his mother’s cousin, James Lampton, it embodies—­and in no very exaggerated degree—­characteristics that were his own.  The tendency to make millions was always imminent; temptation was always hard to resist.  Money-making schemes are continually being placed before men of means and prominence, and Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes fatally attractive.

It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in a typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by.  It was because of this characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser importance, but no less disastrous in the end.  His one successful commercial venture was his association with Charles L. Webster in the publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to pay a royalty of more than four hundred thousand dollars to Grant’s widow —­the largest royalty ever paid from any single publication.  It saved the Grant family from poverty.  Yet even this triumph was a misfortune to Mark Twain, for it led to scores of less profitable book ventures and eventual disaster.

Meanwhile he had written and published a number of books.  Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court were among the volumes that had entertained the world and inspired it with admiration and love for their author.  In 1878-79 he had taken his family to Europe, where they spent their time in traveling over the Continent.  It was during this period that he was joined by his intimate friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford, and the two made a journey, the story of which is told in A Tramp Abroad.