iates, just as De Quille
was "Dan" and Goodman "Joe." He found that he disliked the name of Josh,
and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped. 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 ingeniou