a new territory collects together, and it will be readily
understood that a reporter for a daily paper in such a place must
neither go about his duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be
fastidious about having gilt edges to his note-books. In Mark
Twain I found the very man I had expected to see--a flower of the
wilderness, tinged with the colour of the soil, the man of thought
and the man of action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker,
Momus in a felt hat and jack-boots. In the reporter of the
'Territorial Enterprise' I became introduced to a Californian
celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy,
quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization
had allowed his humour to develop without restraint, and his speech
to be rarely idiomatic."

Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the
'Enterprise', strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of
journalism, Clemens learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style
which characterizes his writing. As a reporter, he was really
industrious in matters that met his fancy; but "cast-iron items"--for he
hated facts and figures requiring absolute accuracy--got from him only
"a lick and a promise." He was much interested in Tom Fitch's effort to
establish a literary journal, 'The Weekly Occidental'. Daggett's
opening chapters of a wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs Fitch, J. T.
Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Clemens were to write successive
instalments, gave that paper the _coup de grace_ in its very first
issue. Of this wonderful novel, at the close of each instalment of
which the "hero was left in a position of such peril that it seemed
impossible he could be rescued, except through means and wisdom more
than human"; of the Bohemian days of the "Visigoths,"--Clemens, De
Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confreres; of the practical