第37章

I work as I always did--by fits and starts.I wrote two articles last night for the Californian, so that lets me out for two weeks.That would be about seventy-five dollars, in greenbacks, wouldn't it?

Been down to San Jose (generally pronounced Sannozay -emphasis on last syllable)-today fifty miles from here, by railroad.Town of 6,000inhabitants, buried in flowers and shrubbery.The climate is finer than ours here, because it is not so close to the ocean, and is protected from the winds by the coast range.

I had an invitation today, to go down on an excursion to San Luis Obispo, and from thence to the city of Mexico, to be gone six or eight weeks, or possibly longer, but I could not accept, on account of my contract to act as chief mourner or groomsman at Steve's wedding.

I have triumphed.They refused me and other reporters some information at a branch of the Coroner's office--Massey's undertaker establishment, a few weeks ago.I published the wickedest article on them I ever wrote in my life, and you can rest assured we got all the information we wanted after that.

By the new census, San Francisco has a population of 130,000.They don't count the hordes of Chinamen.

Yrs aftly, SAM.

I send a picture for Annie, and one for Aunt Ella--that is, if she will have it.

Relations with the Call ceased before the end of the year, though not in the manner described in Roughing It.Mark Twain loved to make fiction of his mishaps, and to show himself always in a bad light.As a matter of fact, he left the Call with great willingness, and began immediately contributing a daily letter to the Enterprise, which brought him a satisfactory financial return.

In the biographical sketch with which this volume opens, and more extendedly elsewhere, has been told the story of the trouble growing out of the Enterprise letters, and of Mark Twain's sojourn with James Gillis in the Tuolumne Hills.Also how, in the frowsy hotel at Angel's Camp, he heard the frog anecdote that would become the corner-stone of his fame.There are no letters of this period--only some note-book entries.It is probable that he did not write home, believing, no doubt, that he had very little to say.

For more than a year there is not a line that has survived.Yet it had been an important year; the jumping frog story, published in New York, had been reprinted East and West, and laughed over in at least a million homes.Fame had not come to him, but it was on the way.

Yet his outlook seems not to have been a hopeful one.

To Mrs.Jane Clemens and Mrs.Moffett, in St.Louis:

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan.20, 1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful.I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again.Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting.

To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.

But no matter.His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers.

This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta:

(Clipping pasted in.)

"Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November i8th, called 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,' has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark.I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near.It is voted the best thing of the day.Cannot the Californian afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California press."The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co.gave the sketch to the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.

Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte, I think, though he denies it, along with the rest.He wants me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and publish a book.

I wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble.But I want to know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first.However, he has written to a New York publisher, and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we will go to work and prepare the volume for the press.

Yours affy, SAM.

Bret Harte and Clemens had by this time quit the Californian, expecting to contribute to Eastern periodicals.Clemens, however, was not yet through with Coast journalism.There was much interest just at this time in the Sandwich Islands, and he was selected by the foremost Sacramento paper to spy out the islands and report aspects and conditions there.His letters home were still infrequent, but this was something worth writing.

To Mrs.Jane Clemens and Mrs.Moffett, in St.Louis:

SAN FRANCISCO, March 5th, 1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I start to do Sandwich Islands day after tomorrow, (I suppose Annie is geographer enough by this time to find them on the map), in the steamer "Ajax." We shall arrive there in about twelve days.My friends seem determined that I shall not lack acquaintances, for I only decided today to go, and they have already sent me letters of introduction to everybody down there worth knowing.I am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the great cataracts and the volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters to the Sacramento Union--for which they pay me as much money as I would get if Istaid at home.

If I come back here I expect to start straight across the continent by way of the Columbia river, the Pend d'Oreille Lakes, through Montana and down the Missouri river,--only 200 miles of land travel from San Francisco to New Orleans.

Goodbye for the present.

Yours, SAM.