judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral." It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, "and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_ you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr.