Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the _Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the _Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_ was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling his own soul.