While the carriage was waiting, Mrs. Clemens went back and took a last look into each of the rooms, as if bidding a kind of good-by to the past.  Then she entered the carriage, and Patrick McAleer, who had been with Mark Twain and his wife since their wedding-day, drove them to the station for the last time.

Mark Twain had a contract for six newspaper letters at one thousand dollars each.  He was troubled with rheumatism in his arm, and wrote his first letter from Aix-les-Bains, a watering-place—­a “health-factory,” as he called it—­and another from Marienbad.  They were in Germany in August, and one day came to Heidelberg, where they occupied their old apartment of thirteen years before, room forty, in the Schloss Hotel, with its far prospect of wood and hill, the winding Neckar, and the blue, distant valley of the Rhine.  Then, presently, they came to Switzerland, to Ouchy-Lausanne, by lovely Lake Geneva, and here Clemens left the family and, with a guide and a boatman, went drifting down the Rhone in a curious, flat-bottomed craft, thinking to find material for one or more articles, possibly for a book.  But drifting down that fair river through still September days, past ancient, drowsy villages, among sloping vineyards, where grapes were ripening in the tranquil sunlight, was too restful and soothing for work.  In a letter home, he wrote: 

“It’s too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days, in peace and quietness.  Some of the curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it’s so lovely afloat that I don’t stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. . .  I want to do all the rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather.”

One afternoon, about fifteen miles below the city of Valence, he made a discovery.  Dreamily observing the eastward horizon, he noticed that a distant blue mountain presented a striking profile outline of Napoleon Bonaparte.  It seemed really a great natural wonder, and he stopped that night at the village just below, Beauchastel, a hoary huddle of houses with the roofs all run together, and took a room at the little hotel, with a window looking to the eastward, from which, next morning, he saw the profile of the great stone face, wonderfully outlined against the sunrise.  He was excited over his discovery, and made a descriptive note of it and an outline sketch.  Then, drifting farther down the river, he characteristically forgot all about it and did not remember it again for ten years, by which time he had forgotten the point on the river where the Napoleon could be seen, forgotten even that he had made a note and sketch giving full details.  He wished the Napoleon to be found again, believing, as he declared, that it would become one of the natural wonders of the world.  To travelers going to France he attempted to describe it, and some of these tried to find it; but, as he located it too far down the Rhone, no one reported success, and in