g story--a
mere casual entry of its main features:

Coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $50--stranger had no
frog, and C. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled C.'s
frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won.

It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the
nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. The hills along the
Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no
other of such size as that.

L. BACK TO THE TUMULT

FROM the note-book:

February 25. Arrived in Stockton 5 p.m. Home again home again at
the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco--find letters from Artemus Ward
asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory
Travels which is soon to come out. Too late--ought to have got the
letters three months ago. They are dated early in November.

He was sorry not to oblige Ward, sorry also not to have representation
in his book. He wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story
of his absence. Steve Gillis, meantime, had returned to San Francisco,
and settled his difficulties there. The friends again took up residence
together.

Mark Twain resumed his daily letters to the Enterprise, without further
annoyance from official sources. Perhaps there was a temporary truce
in that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic,
private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing
for himself the title of the "Moralist of the Main." The letters were
reprinted in San Francisco and widely read. Now and then some one
had the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a
discreet silence. In one of these letters he told of the Mexican oyster,
a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand
criticism, and presently disappeared from the market. It was a mistake,
however, for him to attack an Alta journalist by the name of Evans.
Evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended:

Gone, gone, gone
--Gone to his endeavor;
Gone, gone, gone,
Forever and forever.

In the Enterprise letter following its publication Mark Twain referred
to this poem. He parodied the refrain and added, "If there is any
criticism to make on it I should say there is a little too much 'gone'
and not enough 'forever.'"

It was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous