"

Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching,
singeing blast that the brute's owner sold him next day for a Mexican
hairless dog.

We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. A home
letter of September 25, 1864, says:

We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging
five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have
no fault to find with the rooms or the people. We are the only
lodgers-in a well-to-do private family . . . . But I need change
and must move again.

This was the Minna Street place--the place of the dog. In the same
letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which
he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he
says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles
at twelve dollars each.

XLVII

BOHEMIAN DAYS

Mark Twain's position on the 'Call' was uncongenial from the start. San
Francisco was a larger city than Virginia; the work there was necessarily
more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery. He once
set down his own memories of it:

At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour
and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They
were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and
Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a
change.

During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end,
gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required
columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some. At
night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights
in the week. We remained in each of those places five minutes, got
the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a
text we "wrote up" those plays and operas, as the phrase goes,
torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to
say about those performances which we had not said a couple of
hundred times before.

It was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of
interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man.

On the Enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to
license. He could write what he wished, and was personally responsible
to the readers. On the Call he was simply a part of a news-machine;
restric