The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life--the bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that Mark Twain--as who would not?--believed, aye, knew, that this sweet, human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications of the moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony, present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw. In that amusing, naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing; but she maintains that he was more interested in earnest books and earnest conversation than in humorous ones. She pronounced him to be as much of a Pholosopher (sic) as anything. And she hazards the opinion that he might have done a great deal in this direction if only he had studied when he was a boy!