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The E-Sylum:  Volume 4, Number 25, June 17, 2001, Article 11

QUIZ QUESTION: MYSTERY MINT EMPLOYEE 

   Time for an E-Sylum Quiz:  While employed as Secretary of 
   the United States Mint at San Francisco, this nineteenth century 
   author carried on his literary work outside mint hours, and 
   became a celebrated American literary figure who was popular 
   as a writer of fiction and humorous verse about the American 
   West, and was close with the likes of Mark Twain and Henry 
   James. 

   In his own words he describes his first encounter with Twain: 
   "His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was 
   careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference 
   to surroundings and circumstances.  Barnes introduced him as 
   Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very 
   unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed 
   over the signature of  'Mark Twain.'  We talked on different 
   topics, and about a month afterwards Clemens dropped in 
   upon me again.  He had been away in the mining districts on 
   some newspaper assignment in the meantime.  In the course 
   of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that 
   prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond 
   anything in his previous experience. He said the men did 
   nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, 
   and "swop lies."   He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, 
   which was in itself irresistible.  He went on to tell one of those 
   extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the 
   lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. It was as graphic 
   as it was delicious.  I asked him to tell it again to a friend who 
   came in, and then asked him to write it out for "The Californian." 
   He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It 
   was the first work of his that attracted general attention, and it 
   crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading.   The story was 
   "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras."   It is known and laughed 
   over,  I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; 
   but it will never be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, 
   told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that 
   morning in San Francisco Mint." 

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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