We sailed on the 15th of July in the Norman, a beautiful ship, perfectly appointed. The voyage to England occupied a short fortnight, without a stop except at Madeira. A good and restful voyage for tired people, and there were several of us. I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years, though it was only a twelvemonth, and a considerable number of the others were Reformers who were fagged out with their five months of seclusion in the Pretoria prison.
Our trip around the earth ended at the Southampton pier, where we embarked thirteen months before. It seemed a fine and large thing to have accomplished—the circumnavigation of this great globe in that little time, and I was privately proud of it. For a moment. Then came one of those vanity-snubbing astronomical reports from the Observatory-people, whereby it appeared that another great body of light had lately flamed up in the remotenesses of space which was traveling at a gait which would enable it to do all that I had done in a minute and a half. Human pride is not worth while; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.
From Fatout (p 265): On July 15 the party set sail on the Norman for a two-weeks’ voyage to Southampton. To Henry Rogers, Mark Twain wrote that he had become very tired of the platform toward the end, particularly of the demands of a heavy schedule that had forced upon him a regime of rest and self-denial. He hoped that need would never again drive him back to lecturing. Summing up the experience in Following the Equator, he said: “I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years, though it was only a twelve-month.” He had given about a hundred readings in fifty-three cities of five countries. How much money he sent back to Henry Rogers is unknown. On the basis of fragmentary evidence, a conjecture is that the tour yielded a net of twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars. It was not enough to discharge the debt, but Mark Twain had not expected to do that.
Regardless of platform fatigue, he looked forward to several weeks of speaking in England in September, and at least two seasons in the United States. These plans were shattered—as the family was shattered—by the death of Susy Clemens on August 18, 1896.