as a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from
Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry's as he came in for rest
and refreshment.

"Mrs. Curry," he said once, "I have seen tireder men than I am,
and lazier men, but they were dead men." He liked the home feeling
there--the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and
homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred.

Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever
met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken,
who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men--kings,
poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken's spell. Dan de Quille
and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the
most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her
his literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home
letters, perhaps with a sort of pride.

I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken's
wife. She is a literary cuss herself.

She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she
writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters
are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus:

"My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and
beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your
manuscript."

But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat
later, in San Francisco, his "madness" would have seemed to have been
allayed.

XLV. A COMSTOCK DUEL. The success--such as it was--of his occasional
contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain's
ambition for a wider field of labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet
his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form.

Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in
that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find
his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so
the Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It
was just at the time of the "Flour Sack Sanitary Fund," the story of
which is related at length in 'Roughing It'. In the general hilarity of
this occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule
had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause
naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle. Very
soon the origina