It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on.
The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk,
near and far, and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort.
Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston and
New York, and every foreign notable who visited America made a pilgrimage
to Hartford to see Mark Twain. Some even went as far as Elmira, among
them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a chapter of his American
Notes. Kipling declared he had come all the way from India to see Mark
Twain.

Hartford had its own literary group. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived
near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner. The Clemens and
Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age, published
in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark Twain. The
character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become immortal, and it is
a character that only Mark Twain could create, for, though drawn from his
mother's cousin, James Lampton, it embodies--and in no very exaggerated
degree--characteristics that were his own. The tendency to make millions
was always imminent; temptation was always hard to resist. Money-making
schemes are continually being placed before men of means and prominence,
and Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes fatally
attractive.

It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in
a typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars
and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by. It was because of this
characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser
importance, but no less disastrous in the end. His one successful
commercial venture was his association with Charles L. Webster in the
publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to pay