"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out." What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon his life? "A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," "was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out."