border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union
and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting,
not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of
his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When
this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the northwest with his
brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada. Thus the
man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone
East as a jour printer, who had been again and again up and down the
Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and
impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate
knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the
most precious of his possessions.

While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two signed
"Mark Twain"--taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead
and who cries "By the mark, three," "Mark twain," and so on. In Nevada
he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in 'Roughing
It,' but when he failed to "strike it rich," he naturally drifted into
journalism and back into a newspaper office again. The 'Virginia City
Enterprise' was not overmanned, and the new-comer did all sorts of odd
jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important
enough to permit of his signature. The name of Mark Twain soon began to
be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he
was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual
employment on the 'Morning Call,' and where he joined himself to a
little group of aspiring literators which included Bret Harte, Noah
Brooks, Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddart.

It was in 1867 that Webb published Mark Twain's first book, the
'Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras'; and it was in 1867 that the