that he was in his private office.
Discouragements and difficulties followed, but after a while I got by
the frontier and entered the holy of holies. Ah, now I remember how I
managed it! Webb had made an appointment for me with Carleton; otherwise
I never should have gotten over that frontier. Carleton rose and said
brusquely and aggressively,

"Well, what can I do for you?"

I reminded him that I was there by appointment to offer him my book for
publication. He began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and
swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the
second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken
up, and for two or three minutes I couldn't see him for the rain. It was
words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the
atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand, which
comprehended the whole room and said,

"Books--look at those shelves! Every one of them is loaded with books
that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I
don't. Good morning."

Twenty-one years elapsed before I saw Carleton again. I was then
sojourning with my family at the Schweitzerhof, in Luzerne. He called on
me, shook hands cordially, and said at once, without any preliminaries,

"I am substantially an obscure person, but I have at least one
distinction to my credit of such colossal dimensions that it entitles me
to immortality--to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand
without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century."

It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so, and said it was a
long-delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be
devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken
his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly
cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy,
even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued
friend and never kill him again.

I reported my adventure to Webb, and he bravely said that not all the
Carletons in the universe should defeat that book; he would publish it
himself on a ten per cent. royalty. And so he did. He brought it out in
blue and gold, and made a very pretty little book of it, I think he
named it "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other
Sketches," price $1.25. He made the plates and printed and bound the
book through a job-p