The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these "three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life that has been unfolded in these pages. "There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. "Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always "trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great surrender. Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda packet: