This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to "follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not