ilure of the duel. A very strict
law had just been passed, making it a felony even to send or accept
a challenge. Clemens, on the whole, rather tired of Virginia City
and Carson, thought it a good time to go across the mountains to San
Francisco. With Steve Gillis, a printer, of whom he was very fond
--an inveterate joker, who had been more than half responsible for
the proposed duel, and was to have served as his second--he took the
stage one morning, and in due time was in the California metropolis,
at work on the Morning Call.

Clemens had been several times in San Francisco, and loved the
place. We have no letter of that summer, the first being dated
several months after his arrival. He was still working on the Call
when it was written, and contributing literary articles to the
Californian, of which Bret Harte, unknown to fame, was editor.
Harte had his office just above the rooms of the Call, and he and
Clemens were good friends. San Francisco had a real literary group
that, for a time at least, centered around the offices of the Golden
Era. In a letter that follows Clemens would seem to have scorned
this publication, but he was a frequent contributor to it at one
period. Joaquin Miller was of this band of literary pioneers; also
Prentice Mulford, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, and
Orpheus C. Kerr.

To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

Sept. 25, 1864.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--You can see by my picture that this superb
climate agrees with me. And it ought, after living where I was never
out of sight of snow peaks twenty-four hours during three years. Here
we have neither snow nor cold weather; fires are never lighted, and yet
summer clothes are never worn--you wear spring clothing the year round.

Steve Gillis, who has been my comrade for two years, and who came down
here with me, is to be married, in a week or two, to a very pretty girl
worth $130,000 in her own right--and then I shall be alone again, until
they build a house, which they will do shortly.

We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings
five times, and our hotel twice. We are very comfortably fixed where
we are, now, and have no fault to find with the rooms or with the
people--we are the only lodgers in a well-to-do private fam