Howells, "the recognized critical Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"? The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly _happy_ than I am I defy the world to produce him and _prove_ him." And it seems always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, "happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: "Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know my temperament"?