A desert of human sand!--the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of existence inevitably droop and wither." Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain "did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking "sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals--we have it from "Tom Sawyer"--"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, without enough power, grating on their own metal.