ns
tell:

We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always
talking of such things; then he said:

"Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old
man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybody
in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders
weren't long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but
me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I
threw the old man the end of it. He caught it and I told him to tie
it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down."

This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far.
Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for
Horace Bixby remembers that "Sam was always scribbling when not at the
wheel."

But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge
it later--with one exception. The exception was not intended for
publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his
immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once, but
it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general
circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the
best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.

That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by
an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers--a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the
river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity
of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general
information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and
signed them "Mark Twain." They were quaintly egotistical in tone,
usually beginning: "My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New
Orleans," and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as
1811.

Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots,
who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of
speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length
a broadly burlesque imitation signed "Sergeant Fathom," with an
introduction which referred to the said Fathom as "one of the oldest
cub pilots on the river." The letter that followed related a perfectly
impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer "the
old first Jubilee" with a "Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew." It is a
gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full to