A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the compulsions of his childhood. * * * * * But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about [the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself.