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The Age of Reason": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were constantly being suppressed as immoral by the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great centres: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested for his first impertant book—The New Pilgrim's Progress—was regarded in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbours and daily associates: it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose "community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them?

His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his Sketches, that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law;s loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early Sketches a risky note now and then intrudes itself: A Mysterious Visit, for example, that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" lie