I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it. Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe.