exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, transgressed his principle of growth? One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone