GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_. Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him out for destruction. Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment.