yours. I have never swindled anybody, and I don't intend to begin now."

Neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would
be international property; that in due course Nevada would propose
statues to their memory.

Such things came out of the Comstock; such things spring out of every
turbulent frontier.

XLIII

ARTEMUS WARD

Madame Caprell's warning concerning Mark Twain's health at twenty-eight
would seem to have been justified. High-strung and neurotic, the strain
of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him. As in
later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that
year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at
Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling
springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable
hotel. He contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in form
than any of his previous work. "Curing a Cold" is a more or less
exaggerated account of his ills.

[Included in Sketches New and Old. "Information for the Million,"
and "Advice to Good Little Girls," included in the "Jumping Frog"
Collection, 1867, but omitted from the Sketches, are also believed
to belong to this period.]

A portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs,
still exists.

You have given my vanity a deadly thrust. Behold, I am prone to
boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man
on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me "if I
work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place
on a big San Francisco daily some day." There's a comment on human
vanity for you! Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I
could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I
don't want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me
what my place on the Enterprise is worth. If I were not naturally a
lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me
$20,000 a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account. I
lead an easy life, though, and I don't care a cent whether school
keeps or not. Everybody knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever
I go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other. And I am
proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.

You think that picture looks old? Well, I can'