him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins--was there anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason." A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of limitations--you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out"--how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? For Mark Twain was right--things do not happen by chance, and the psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory of that last English welcome, the _Begum_ of Bengal, stateliest of Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea?