far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist: Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others--his last breath. And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor --death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction. Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his personality.