that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _ménage_. It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, "lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._ Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one.