Page:Boys Life of Mark Twain.djvu/327

 ,—The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. .

He refused offers of many sorts. He declined ten thousand dollars for a tobacco indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough. He declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical. He declined another ten thousand for ten lectures, and another offer for fifty lectures at the same rate—that is, one thousand dollars per night. He could get along without these sums, he said, and still preserve some remnants of his self-respect.

It was May, 1899, when Clemens and his family left Vienna. They spent a summer in Sweden on account of the health of Jean Clemens, and located in London apartments—30 Wellington Court—for the winter. Then followed a summer at beautiful Dollis Hill, an old house where Gladstone had often visited, on a shady hilltop just outside of London. The city had not quite inclosed the place then, and there were spreading oaks, a pond with lily-pads, and wide spaces of grassy lawn. The place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. Writing to Twichell in mid-summer, Clemens said: