A new administration came in with 1885 and Harte was superseded. He went
to London and settled down to a simple and regular life. For ten years
he lived with the Van de Veldes, friends of long standing. He wrote with
regularity and published several volumes of stories and sketches. In
1885 Harte visited Switzerland. Of the Alps he wrote: "In spite of their
pictorial composition I wouldn't give a mile of the dear old Sierras,
with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for a
hundred thousand kilometers of the picturesque Vaud."

Of Geneva he wrote: "I thought I should not like it, fancying it a kind
of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old
reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau and the De
Staels, still lingered." But he did like it, and wrote brilliantly of
Lake Leman and Mont Blanc.

Returning to his home in Aldershot he resumed work, giving some time to
a libretto for a musical comedy, but his health was failing and he
accomplished little. A surgical operation for cancer of the throat in
March, 1902, afforded a little relief, but he worked with difficulty.
On April 17th he began a new story, "A Friend of Colonel Starbottle." He
wrote one sentence and began another; but the second sentence was his
last work, though a few letters to friends bear a later date. On May
5th, sitting at his desk, there came a hemorrhage of the throat,
followed later in the day by a second, which left him unconscious.
Before the end of the day he peacefully breathed his last.

Pathetic and inexplicable were the closing days of this gifted man. An
exile from his native land, unattended by family or kin, sustaining his
lonely life by wringing the dregs of memory, and clasping in farewell