a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, "because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against the sluice-gates of a human soul? At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is something awful."