ight of possession. Mark was called away to the bedside
of a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark's note, and the work was
never done--each thinking it was being properly attended to by the
other. On their return, they discovered that their claim was
"re-located," and that millions had slipped from their grasp! The very
stars in their courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into
literature. Had Samuel Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is
virtually certain that there would have been no Mark Twain.

After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens "dropped in" at the
wayside post-office. It was the hour of fate! A letter awaited him
there. We cannot call it accident--it was the result of forces and
events which had long been converging toward this end. Samuel Clemens
began his career as an itinerant, tramping "jour" printer. He wrote for
the papers on which he served as printer; and he actually read the
matter he set up in type. By observation on his travels, by study of
the writing of others, Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life,
and ingenuity of expression. He hadn't served his ten--years'
apprenticeship as a printer for nothing. In the process of setting up
tons of good and bad literature, he had learned--half unconsciously--to
appraise and to discriminate. In the same half-unconscious way, he was
actually gaining some inkling of the niceties of style. After he began
"learning the river," Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain
Sellers which made a genuine "hit" with the officers on the boat. The
sketch fell into the hands of the "river-editor" of the 'St. Louis
Republican', found a place in that journal, and was widely copied
throughout the West. On the strength of it, Clemens became a sort of
river reporter, and from time to time published memoranda and comic
squibs in the 'Republican'. That passion which a French critic has
characterized as distinctively American, the passion for "seeing
yourself in print," still burned in Clemens, even during all the
hardships of prospecting and milling. At intervals he sent from the
mining regions of "Washoe," as all that part of Nevada was then called,
humorous letters signed "Josh" to the 'Daily Territorial Enterprise' of
Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and wide--awake
newspapers in the West.

The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens
from the proprietor of t