rasped by any social situation than was this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which also, like his humour, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves;" naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam swear." Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation.
Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. It was an irresponsible life; it implied a break with civilization, with domestic, religious, and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as we find it pictured in Roughing It. Free as that society was, nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men; they were civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them too, which kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse in origin that any real community of feeling amongst them was virtually impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept a common mould; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to conceal their differences and their personal pre-
