It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. "The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, "are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark Twain's business life. So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain solved by becoming a humorist.