pped.
The office, and Virginia City generally, quickly grew fond of him,
delighting in his originality and measured speech. Enterprise readers
began to identify his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh
phrasing, even when it was only the usual local item or mining notice.
True to its name and reputation, the paper had added a new attraction.

It was only a brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that Clemens
began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always
in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the Pacific coast.
With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there
is not a single file of the Enterprise in existence. Only a few stray
copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of
these literary pranks and of their results. They were usually intended
as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or
locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive
web. Mark Twain himself, in his book of Sketches, has set down something
concerning the first of these, "The Petrified Man," and of another, "My
Bloody Massacre," but in neither case has he told it all. "The Petrified
Man" hoax was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and
justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in
the matter of supplying news. The story, told with great circumstance
and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified
prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert
more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall had made the
perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over
a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, "with that
delicacy so characteristic of him," Sewall had forbidden the miners
from blasting him from his position. The account further stated that
the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the
description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other
matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that
the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the
thumb at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express
ridicule and the word "sold." But the description was a shade too
ingenious. The author expected that the exchanges would see the jolt
and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with Sewall. He did not
contemplate a joke on