Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the proprietors of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of letters from the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to give an account of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar, but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these months of “luxurious vagrancy” he described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic style his great “scoop” of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital, so that he could interview the half-dead sailors. His bill--twenty dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a column for the Hornet story--was paid with all good will. On the strength of this story, he hoped to become a “Literary Person,” and sent his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it appeared in December, 1866. But alas! he could not give the banquet he was going to give to celebrate his debut as a “Literary Person.” He had not written the “Mark Twain” distinctly, and when it appeared it had been transformed into “Mike Swain”! When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example of Stoddard and Mulford, and “enter the lecture field.” The “extraneous matter” in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him “notorious”; and, as he put it, “San Francisco invited me to lecture.” The historic account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this book. Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at this lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description: “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, and, above all, 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. All this was original; it was Mark Twain.” Employing D. E. McCarthy as his agent, Mark gave a number of lectures at various places on the Pacific Coast. From this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain one of the supreme masters of the art of lecturing in our time.