and American character which is one of the most precious of his possessions. While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two which found their way into print. In Nevada he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in _Roughing It_, but when he failed to “strike it rich,” he naturally drifted into journalism and back into a newspaper office again. The _Virginia City Enterprise_ was not overmanned, and the newcomer did all sorts of odd jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important enough to permit of his signature. He now began to sign himself Mark Twain, taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead on a Mississippi River steamboat, and who cries, “By the mark, three,” “Mark Twain,” and so on. The name of Mark Twain soon began to be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual employment on the _Morning Call_, and where he joined himself to a little group of aspiring _literators_ which included Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Noah Brooks, Mr. Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard. It was in 1867 that Mr. Webb published Mark Twain’s first book, _The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras_; and it was in 1867 that the proprietors of the _Alta California_ supplied him with the funds necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer _Quaker City_, which had been chartered to take a select party on what is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly letters, in which he set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the _Alta_ Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian papers. These letters served as the foundation of a book published in 1869 and called _The Innocents Abroad_, a book which instantly brought to the author celebrity and cash. Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step, his appearance on the lecture platform. Mr. Noah Brooks, who was present at his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain’s “method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.” In the thirty years since that first appearance the method has not changed, although it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one of the most effective of platform speakers and one of the most artistic, with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in spite of its seeming simplicity.