That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to a _métier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance. Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly anything else.