quotable flavor, and it made Evans mad. In a squib in the Alta he
retaliated:

Mark Twain has killed the Mexican oyster. We only regret that the
act was not inspired by a worthier motive. Mark Twain's sole reason
for attacking the Mexican oyster was because the restaurant that
sold them refused him credit.

A deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print. To deny or
recriminate would be to appear ridiculous. One could only sweat and
breathe vengeance.

"Joe," he said to Goodman, who had come over for a visit, "my one object
in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and
murder Evans."

He wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his Enterprise letters
with jingles. One of these concerned Tom Maguire, the autocrat manager
of San Francisco theaters. It details Maguire's assault on one of his
actors.

Tom Maguire,
Roused to ire,
Lighted on McDougal;
Tore his coat,
Clutched his throat,
And split him in the bugle.

For shame! oh, fie!
Maguire, why
Will you thus skyugle?
Why curse and swear,
And rip and tear
The innocent McDougal?

Of bones bereft,
Almost, you've left
Vestvali, gentle Jew gal;
And now you've smashed
And almost hashed
The form of poor McDougall

Goodman remembers that Clemens and Gillis were together again on
California Street at this time, and of hearing them sing, "The Doleful
Ballad of the Rejected Lover," another of Mark Twain's compositions. It
was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which Mark
and Steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists,
did not render it less objectionable. Such memories as these are set
down here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built
of the same primeval material from which the world was created--built
of every variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human
being--equally capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest
and most tender of all characterizations, the 'Recollections of JOAN of
ARC'.

LI. THE CORNER-STONE

Along with his Enterprise work, Clemens continued to write occasionally
for the Californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of
the jumping frog. For one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary
material. He knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor a