of that year and presently Charles H.
Webb, whom I had known in San Francisco as a reporter on _The Bulletin_,
and afterward editor of _The Californian_, suggested that I publish a
volume of sketches. I had but a slender reputation to publish it on, but
I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture
it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the
sketches together. I was loath to do it myself, for from the beginning
of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where
the industry ought to be. ("Ought to was" is better, perhaps, though
the most of the authorities differ as to this.)

Webb said I had some reputation in the Atlantic States, but I knew quite
well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. What there was of it
rested upon the story of "The Jumping Frog." When Artemus Ward passed
through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or '66, I told him the
"Jumping Frog" story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out
and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in
padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and
which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price
which was to be charged for it.

It reached Carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not
willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book. He
did not put it in the waste-basket, but made Henry Clapp a present of
it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary
journal, _The Saturday Press_. "The Jumping Frog" appeared in the last
number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and
was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It
certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I
am speaking of--but I was aware that it was only the frog that was
celebrated. It wasn't I. I was still an obscurity.

Webb undertook to collate the sketches. He performed this office, then
handed the result to me, and I went to Carleton's establishment with it.
I approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire
into my needs; but when he found that I had come to sell a book and not
to buy one, his temperature fell sixty degrees, and the old-gold
intrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three-quarters of an
inch and my teeth fell out. I meekly asked the privilege of a word with
Mr. Carleton, and was coldly informed