Mark Twain's Death, rough draft....

*In early January of 1910, Mark Twain sailed to Bermuda. It was his paradise. A place he could unwind. His first visit to the island was in 1867. He marveled at the white limestone mass of terraced architecture he found in Hamilton, the capitol city. But this visit was very different. He was here to heal his broken and defective heart. The death of his 29 year old daughter Jean, only weeks before...and the pain and breathlessness brought on by his increasingly oxygen starved heart, made this journey to paradise a necessity. He stayed with his friends the Allen’s at Bay House set on the edge of Hamilton harbor. *In early April, just as the first signs of the Connecticut spring began to appear, Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's biographer, received word of Twain's failing health. Paine quickly made plans to travel to Bermuda to bring the Twain back to Redding.

*On the journey home, Twain's breathing became labored. His chest pains continued and he was unable to sleep. Pain gave him morphine injections but they had little effect. As long as I remember anything, wrote Paine, I shall remember the forty eight hours of that homeward journey.

*The Oceana arrived in New York harbor on the morning of April 14th. Twain was carried off the ship and taken to Redding by train. The same scheduled train that had taken him to his new Redding home 22 months earlier.

*A week later, on the evening of April 21st, with his daughter Clara and her husband, the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitch at his bed side, the silent Twain exhaled and slipped away. Mark Twain, Samuel langhorne Clemens was dead.