In this, and in his blind worship of imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that phenomenon in all history. Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it was in his power and his fame.