d look into the fire, smiling
a little sometimes, but never saying a word. A number of the tales later
used by Mark Twain were first told by Jim Gillis in the cabin on Jackass
Hill. "Dick Baker's Cat" was one of these, the jay-bird and acorn story
in "A Tramp Abroad" was another. Mark Twain had little to add to these
stories.

"They are not mine, they are Jim's," he said, once; "but I never could
get them to sound like Jim--they were never as good as his."

It was early in December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at the humble
retreat, built of logs under a great live-oak tree, and surrounded by a
stretch of blue-grass. A younger Gillis boy was there at the time, and
also, of course, Dick Stoker and his cat, Tom Quartz, which every reader
of "Roughing It" knows.

It was the rainy season, but on pleasant days they all went
pocket-mining, and, in January, Mark Twain, Gillis, and Stoker crossed
over into Calaveras County and began work near Angel's Camp, a place well
known to readers of Bret Harte. They put up at a poor hotel in Angel's,
and on good days worked pretty faithfully. But it was generally raining,
and the food was poor.

In his note-book, still preserved, Mark Twain wrote: "January 27 (1865).
--Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to
rush back."

So they spent a good deal of their time around the rusty stove in the
dilapidated tavern at Angel's Camp. It seemed a profitless thing to do,
but few experiences were profitless to Mark Twain, and certainly this one
was not.

At this barren mining hotel there happened to be a former Illinois River
pilot named Ben Coon, a solemn, sleepy person, who dozed by the stove or
told slow, pointless stories to any one who would listen. Not many would
stay to hear him, but Jim Gillis and Mark Twain found him a delight.
They would let him wander on in his dull way for hours, and saw a vast
humor in a man to whom all tales, however trivial or absurd, were serious
history.

At last, one dreary afternoon, he told them about a frog--a frog that had
belonged to a man named Coleman, who had trained it to jump, and how the
trained frog had failed to win a wager because the owner of the rival
frog had slyly loaded the trained jumper with shot. It was not a new
story in the camps, but Ben Coon made a long tale of it, and it happened
that neither Clemens nor Gillis had heard it before. They thought it
amusing, and his solemn way of telling it still more