Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the "wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body "a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to account for his constant preoccupation with this idea.