ave been entertaining himself with
horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a
cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And
no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.

Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary
advertising for the book, with "Life on the Mississippi" as his subject.
Osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was
just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken
the back of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular
time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to
Osgood has not been preserved.

Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday
Evening Club on "What is Happiness?" presenting a theory which in later
years he developed as a part of his "gospel," and promulgated in a
privately printed volume, 'What is Man'? It is the postulate already
mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human
action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say,
the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. It is not a
new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or
rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was
startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club. They scoffed
and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. They did not quite
see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine;
that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas
he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine
contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. Mark
Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort:

"Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit
where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while
contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and
the community."

It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it
does seem to conflict with that other theory--the inevitable sequence
of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. There is seeming
irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological
relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. Clemens was
forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic
at lea