August, 1895.  Dear Kipling,—­It is reported that you are about to visit India.  This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you.  Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time.  It has always been my purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day.  I shall arrive next January and you must be ready.  I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty. 
                         Affectionately,
                              S. L. Clemens.

Clemens, platforming in Australia, was too busy to write letters.  Everywhere he was welcomed by great audiences, and everywhere lavishly entertained.  He was beset by other carbuncles, but would seem not to have been seriously delayed by them.  A letter to his old friend Twichell carries the story.

To Rev. Jos.  H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

FrankMOELLER’S Masonic hotel,
Napier, new Zealand,
November 29, ’95. 
Dear Joe,—­Your welcome letter of two months and five days ago has just arrived, and finds me in bed with another carbuncle.  It is No. 3.  Not a serious one this time.  I lectured last night without inconvenience, but the doctors thought best to forbid to-night’s lecture.  My second one kept me in bed a week in Melbourne.

.....We are all glad it is you who is to write the article, it delights
us all through.

I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at Napier, instead of some hotel in the centre of a noisy city.  Here we have the smooth and placidly-complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us and it but 20 yards of shingle—­and hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or make a noise.  Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the Equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue—­a foreign tongue—­tongue bred among the ice-fields of the Antarctic—­a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from.  It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night and find it still pulsing there.  I wish you were here—­land, but it would be fine!

Livy and Clara enjoy this nomadic life pretty well; certainly better than one could have expected they would.  They have tough experiences, in the way of food and beds and frantic little ships, but they put up with the worst that befalls with heroic endurance that resembles contentment.

No doubt I shall be on the platform next Monday.  A week later we shall reach Wellington; talk there 3 nights, then sail back to Australia.  We sailed for New Zealand October 30.