ot increased Mark Twain's regard
for it as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he
believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written
January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself:

I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was
back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is
vanity and little worth--save piloting.

To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused
for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out
a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! "Jim Smiley and
His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but
to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to
appear in his book.

But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally
speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear
between its covers.

This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco
Alta:

"Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called
'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,' has set all New York in a roar,
and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty
times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and
near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the
'Californian' afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let
him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the
California press."

The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co. gave the sketch to
the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.

It is difficult to judge the jumping Frog story to-day. It has the
intrinsic fundamental value of one of AEsop's Fables.--[The resemblance
of the frog story to the early Greek tales must have been noted by Prof.
Henry Sidgwick, who synopsized it in Greek form and phrase for his book,
Greek Prose Composition. Through this originated the impression that the
story was of Athenian root. Mark Twain himself was deceived, until in
1899, when he met Professor Sidgwick, who explained that the Greek
version was the translation and Mark Twain's the original; that he had
thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known. See The
Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]--It contains a basic idea
which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of it