But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, "was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he set them down"--the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and beaten and sold--"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"--with one inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"?