In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": "even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, "and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the book, "I guess this is where our line starts"?