4 minutes. These fissures extend more than a quarter of a mile, and the
long line of steam columns looks very pretty. A large bath house is
built over one of the springs, and we go in it and steam ourselves as
long as we can stand it, and then come out and take a cold shower bath.
You get baths, board and lodging, all for $25 a week--cheaper than living
in Virginia without baths.....
Yrs aft
MARK.


It was now the autumn of 1863. Mark Twain was twenty-eight years
old. On the Coast he had established a reputation as a gaily
original newspaper writer. Thus far, however, he had absolutely no
literary standing, nor is there any evidence that he had literary
ambitions; his work was unformed, uncultivated--all of which seems
strange, now, when we realize that somewhere behind lay the
substance of immortality. Rudyard Kipling at twenty-eight had done
his greatest work.

Even Joseph Goodman, who had a fine literary perception and a deep
knowledge of men, intimately associated with Mark Twain as he was,
received at this time no hint of his greater powers. Another man on
the staff of the Enterprise, William Wright, who called himself "Dan
de Quille," a graceful humorist, gave far more promise, Goodman
thought, of future distinction.

It was Artemus Ward who first suspected the value of Mark Twain's
gifts, and urged him to some more important use of them. Artemus in
the course of a transcontinental lecture tour, stopped in Virginia
City, and naturally found congenial society on the Enterprise staff.