ORD

For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent on
literature. He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in
fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more
fully equipped for authorship than ever before. It had been his habit to
write within his knowledge and observation. To a correspondent of this
time he reviewed his stock in trade--

. . . I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when
pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life
out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and
not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a
soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted
like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself
hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity
with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which
is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without
any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is
ever going to see.

Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple
of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that
direction. And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the
one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals
gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and
exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature
ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being
told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain,
would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of
how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who
possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden
treasure with a most deadly precision.

And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find
it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner
and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so
I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte
knows them exteriorly.

And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the
inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two
sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned