Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose "community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them? His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not noticing these little spots on the American sun?