When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative life. Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of the river." He becomes a pilot. Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the world was to know later--"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details"--should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups of wishes--the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's approval, to stand in with pioneer society--were struggling for survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they were actually encouraged, to survive.