We all go to Paris next Thursday—­address, Monroe & Co., Bankers. 
                                   With love
                                             Ys Ever
          
                                             Mark.

In Paris they found pleasant quarters at the Hotel Normandy, but it was a chilly, rainy spring, and the travelers gained a rather poor impression of the French capital.  Mark Twain’s work did not go well, at first, because of the noises of the street.  But then he found a quieter corner in the hotel and made better progress.  In a brief note to Aldrich he said:  “I sleep like a lamb and write like a lion—­I mean the kind of a lion that writes—­if any such.”  He expected to finish the book in six weeks; that is to say, before returning to America.  He was looking after its illustrations himself, and a letter to Frank Bliss, of The American Publishing Company, refers to the frontpiece, which, from time to time, has caused question as to its origin.  To Bliss he says:  “It is a thing which I manufactured by pasting a popular comic picture into the middle of a celebrated Biblical one—­shall attribute it to Titian.  It needs to be engraved by a master.”

The weather continued bad in France and they left there in July to find it little better in England.  They had planned a journey to Scotland to visit Doctor Brown, whose health was not very good.  In after years Mark Twain blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, which he declared would have meant so much to Mrs. Clemens.  He had forgotten by that time the real reasons for not going—­the continued storms and uncertainty of trains (which made it barely possible for them to reach Liverpool in time for their sailing-date), and with characteristic self-reproach vowed that only perversity and obstinacy on his part had prevented the journey to Scotland.  From Liverpool, on the eve of sailing, he sent Doctor Brown a good-by word.

To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh: 

Washingtonhotel, Lime street, Liverpool. 
Aug. (1879)
My dear Mr. Brown,—­During all the 15 months we have been spending on the continent, we have been promising ourselves a sight of you as our latest and most prized delight in a foreign land—­but our hope has failed, our plan has miscarried.  One obstruction after another intruded itself, and our short sojourn of three or four weeks on English soil was thus frittered gradually away, and we were at last obliged to give up the idea of seeing you at all.  It is a great disappointment, for we wanted to show you how much “Megalopis” has grown (she is 7 now) and what a fine creature her sister is, and how prettily they both speak German.  There are six persons in my party, and they are as difficult to cart around as nearly any other menagerie would be.  My wife and Miss Spaulding are along, and you may imagine how they take to heart this failure of our long promised Edinburgh trip.  We never even wrote you, because we were always so sure, from day to day, that our affairs would finally so shape themselves as to let us get to Scotland.  But no,—­everything went wrong we had only flying trips here and there in place of the leisurely ones which we had planned.