d he had arrived on
the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
with refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus
Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon
after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later,
had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
publication.--[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a companion
of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond the
isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it, and it
would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting story in
Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]

In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was
his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.

The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must
provide himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:

I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
house; every seat taken and paid for before night.

He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
the completed manuscript about the middle of June.

But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed
more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment
had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of
the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two
months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.

Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
this time. His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"
published in early numbers of the Ove