Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities--how can we compare the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?--that "man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. "It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke.