ed me that there was no
crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it every day, that he
committed it every day, that every man alive on the earth who writes or
speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time
he opens his mouth; that all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows
cast multitudinously from our readings; that no happy phrase of ours is
ever quite original with us, there is nothing of our own in it except
some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment,
teachings and associations; that this slight change differentiates it
from another man's manner of saying it, stamps it with our special
style, and makes it our own for the time being; all the rest of it being
old, moldy, antique, and smelling of the breath of a thousand
generations of them that have passed it over their teeth before!

In the thirty-odd years which have come and gone since then, I have
satisfied myself that what Dr. Holmes said was true.

I wish to make a note upon the preface of the "Innocents." In the last
paragraph of that brief preface, I speak of the proprietors of the
"Daily Alta California" having "waived their rights" in certain letters
which I wrote for that journal while absent on the "Quaker City" trip. I
was young then, I am white-headed now, but the insult of that word
rankles yet, now that I am reading that paragraph for the first time in
many years, reading it for the first time since it was written, perhaps.
There were rights, it is true--such rights as the strong are able to
acquire over the weak and the absent. Early in '66 George Barnes invited
me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco "Morning
Call," and for some months thereafter I was without money or work; then
I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the "Sacramento
Union," a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich
Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. I was
there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best
known honest man on the Pacific Coast. Thomas McGuire, proprietor of
several theatres, said that now was the time to make my fortune--strike
while the iron was hot!--break into the lecture field! I did it. I
announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement
with the remark, "Admission one dollar; doors open at half-past 7, the
trouble begins at 8." A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin
at