husiasm 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 dead, so far as
he was concerned. His conclusion of service with the Call was certain,
and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long. The connection had
become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee. They had a
heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that Mark Twain was free.
He used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess the
worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been
variously told. George Barnes himself has declared that Clemens resigned
with great willingness. It is very likely that the paragraph at the end
of Chapter LVIII in 'Roughing It' presents the situation with fair
accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for
himself as possible:

"At last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still
remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign
my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal."

As an extreme contrast with the supposititious "butterfly idleness" of
his beginning in San Francisco, and for no other discoverable reason, he
doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book, to
depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and
poverty.

"I became an adept at slinking," he says. "I slunk from back street to
back street.... I slunk to my bed. I had pawned everything but the
clothes I had on."

This is pure fiction. That he occasionally found himself short of funds
is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that he
ever clung to a single "silver ten-cent piece," as he tells us, and
became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether by
his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an
artistic need. Almost immediately following his separation from the
'Call' he arranged with Goodman to write a daily letter for the
Enterprise, reporting San Francisco matters after his own notion with a
free hand. His payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he
had an additional return from his literary sketches. The arrangement was
an improvement both as to labor and income.

Real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of a
liberal offer for the Tennessee land. But alas! it was from a
wine-grower who w