No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," says Mr. Paine--to approach this subject on its broadest side--"he rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who "never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all the others, to the final riddance of _materia medica_.