s telling
is convincing and full of charm. It appeared in print at a time when
American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. We had a vast
appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities
for showing it. We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity
came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of
our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. Whether the
story of "Jim Smiley's Frog," offered for the first time today, would
capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering fame, is
another matter. That the author himself underrated it is certain. That
the public, receiving it at what we now term the psychological moment,
may have overrated it is by no means impossible. In any case, it does
not matter now. The stone rejected by the builder was made the
corner-stone of his literary edifice. As such it is immortal.

In the letter already quoted, Clemens speaks of both Bret Harte and
himself as having quit the 'Californian' in future expecting to write for
Eastern papers. He adds:

Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers
in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret
Harte, I think, though he denies it, along with the rest. He wants
me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and
publish a book. I wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the
trouble. But I want to know whether we are going to make anything
out of it, first. However, he has written to a New York publisher,
and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we
will go to work and prepare the volume for the press.

Nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes
these two had then in mind. Neither of them would seem to have been
optimistic as to their future place in American literature; certainly in
their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within
half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of
letters--the two most talked-of men in America.

LII

A COMMISSION TO THE SANDWICH ISLANDS

Whatever his first emotions concerning the success of "Jim Smiley's Frog"
may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into
American literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as
in distant parts. Those about him were inclined to regard him, in some
degree at lea