he 'Enterprise', of the position of city editor,
at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. To Clemens at this time,
this offer came as a perfect godsend. Twenty-five dollars a week was
nothing short of wealth, luxury. His enthusiasm oozed away when he
reflected over his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled
his repeated failures. But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks
but once at every door. His doubts were speedily resolved; and he
afterwards confessed that, had he been offered at that time a salary to
translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly
have accepted, despite some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw
as much variety into it as he could for the money. It was to fill a
vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter,
on a visit to "the States," that Clemens was offered this position; but
he retained it after De Quille returned. "Mark and I had our hands
full," relates De Quille, "and no grass grew under our feet. There was
a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another
as though playing at leap-frog. While a stage robbery was being written
up, a shooting affray started; and perhaps before the pistol shots had
ceased to echo among the surrounding hills, the firebells were banging
out an alarm." A record of the variegated duties of these two, found in
an old copy of the Territorial Enterprise of 1863, bears the
unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain. "Our duty is to keep the universe
thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls and
theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and
school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and
Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other things which it
is within the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify
into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily
newspaper. Beyond this revelation everything connected with these two
experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable mystery."
An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the latter
part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of "The Genial
Showman," in the introduction to the English edition of "The Innocents
Abroad."

The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of
Hingston; and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office
of the 'Territo