, as I turn to look back.

More than any other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has
always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group
to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras,
which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several
years. They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as
five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as
if it had been a great deal more. They felt that they were creating
literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of American letters
mustered there.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte were distinctive features of this group. They
were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by
themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he
would be remembered later. They were a good deal together, and it was
when Harte was made editor of the Californian that Mark Twain was put
on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate. The
Californian made larger pretensions than the Era, and perhaps had a
heavier financial backing. With Mark Twain on the staff and Bret Harte
in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first
of San Francisco periodicals. A number of the sketches collected by Webb
later, in Mark Twain's first little volume, the Celebrated Jumping Frog,
Etc., appeared in the Era or Californian in 1864 and 1865. They were
smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor
of the day. Some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches.
They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they
present, though some of them are still delightful enough. "The Killing
of Julius Caesar Localized" is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque
report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad. The Answers
to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical
moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. The
Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest. It has a history
of its own, as we shall see a little further along.

The reportorial arrangement was of brief duration. Even the great
San Francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in Mark Twain
any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the 'Call'. He had
lost interest, and when Mark Twain lost interest in a subject or an
undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better d