presence of inexorable Nature--in such an environment were sharpened and whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and imposture. It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and, as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's life. Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand knowledge of human nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer. He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely diversified realities of American life. Mark Twain takes on more and more of the characteristics of the Yankee--those characteristics which constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common--sense. It is the last phase in the formation of the national type.