alive at ninety-three, in 1910), and
tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures,
and keep her laughing until the tears ran.

He was a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from
Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry's as he came in for rest
and refreshment.

"Mrs. Curry," he said once, "I have seen tireder men than I am, and
lazier men, but they were dead men." He liked the home feeling there
--the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and
homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred.

Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever
met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken,
who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men--kings,
poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken's spell. Dan de Quille
and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the
most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her his
literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home
letters, perhaps with a sort of pride.

I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken's wife.
She is a literary cuss herself.

She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she
writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters
are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus:

"My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and
beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your
manuscript."

But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later,
in San Francisco, his "madness" would have seemed to have been allayed.

XLV

A COMSTOCK DUEL

The success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the New
York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain's ambition for a wider field of
labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered
assistance, though in an unexpected form.

Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in
that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find
his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the
Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It was
just at the time of the "Flour Sack Sanitary Fund," the story of which is
related at length in 'Roughing It'. In the general hilarity of this
occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism o