“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.

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 had attracted general attention and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.’ It is now known and laughed over I suppose wherever the English tongue 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 the San Francisco Mint.”