and gold were
there. Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill and
Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and
underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode
whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world.
The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and
adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to
drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold.
Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better. The
town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them. Everybody
had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time. The
Enterprise, "Comstock to the backbone," did what it could to help things
along.

It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. Goodman let the
boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any
subject. Often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which
gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.--[The indifference to
'news' was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully
unconscious. Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of
inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: "Arthur
McEwen"]--It was the proper class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging
audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better
for him than that.

He was peculiarly fitted for the position. Unspoiled humanity appealed
to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape
forms. Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially optimistic--so was he;
any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune.

His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. Remembering
marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the
same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news.
He could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the
day's budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error. He
was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics
--measurements and figures--were concerned. These he gave "a lick and a
promise," according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of their
associations. De Quille says further:

Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was
a rush of events; but we often cruised in compan