I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--he invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian