Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life
--time by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend,
Charles Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it. About four
thousand copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story
was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety. In 1872 it was translated
into the 'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in
England, India, and Australia as it was in America.

Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and
doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the
proprietors of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of
letters from the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to
give an account of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar,
but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had
nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the
sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these
months of "luxurious vagrancy" he described in the most vivid way many
of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such
letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut
as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic
style his great "scoop" of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson
Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital,
so that he could interview the half-dead sailors. His bill--twenty
dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a
column for the Hornet story--was paid with all good will. On the
strength of this story, he hoped to become a "Literary Person," and sent
his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it
appeared in December, 1866. But alas! he could not give the banquet he
was going to give to celebrate his debut as a "Literary Person." He had
not written the "Mark Twain" distinctly, and when it appeared it had