Virginia City looks out over the Eastward Desert. Morning was
just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the
sunrise beams across the plain of Memnon. The city was not yet awake.
The only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners,
with Artemus Ward, as King Gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise.

That was the beginning of a week of glory. The farewell dinner became
a series. At the close of one convivial session Artemus went to a
concert-hall, the "Melodeon," blacked his face, and delivered a speech.
He got away from Virginia about the close of the year.

A day or two later he wrote from Austin, Nevada, to his new-found
comrade as "My dearest Love," recalling the happiness of his stay:

"I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as
all others must or rather cannot be, as it were."

Then reflectively he adds:

"Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by
liquor."

Rare Artemus Ward and rare Mark Twain! If there lies somewhere a place
of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those
closing days of '63.

XLIV. GOVERNOR OF THE "THIRD HOUSE"

With Artemus Ward's encouragement, Clemens began to think of extending
his audience eastward. The New York Sunday Mercury published literary
matter. Ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write
a special letter to the editors, introducing Mark Twain and his work.
Clemens prepared a sketch of the Comstock variety, scarcely refined
in character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the
present-day reader. Its general subject was children; it contained
some absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend Zeb
Leavenworth, and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured
soul as for profit or reputation.

"I wrote it especially for Beck Jolly's use," the author declares, in a
letter to his mother, "so he could pester Zeb with it."

We cannot know to-day whether Zeb was pestered or not. A faded clipping
is all that remains of the incident. As literature the article, properly
enough, is lost to the world at large. It is only worth remembering as
his metropolitan beginning. Yet he must have thought rather highly of
it (his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter
above quoted he adds:

I cannot write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have
time. But sometimes I throw off