to glory in. I selected the most important one in New York. The
contribution was accepted. I signed it 'MARK TWAIN;' for that name had
some currency on the Pacific coast, and it was my idea to spread it
all over the world, now, at this one jump. The article appeared in the
December number, and I sat up a month waiting for the January number;
for that one would contain the year's list of contributors, my name
would be in it, and I should be famous and could give the banquet I was
meditating.

I did not give the banquet. I had not written the 'MARK TWAIN'
distinctly; it was a fresh name to Eastern printers, and they put it
'Mike Swain' or 'MacSwain,' I do not remember which. At any rate, I was
not celebrated and I did not give the banquet. I was a Literary Person,
but that was all--a buried one; buried alive.

My article was about the burning of the clipper-ship 'Hornet' on the
line, May 3, 1866. There were thirty-one men on board at the time, and
I was in Honolulu when the fifteen lean and ghostly survivors arrived
there after a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat, through the
blazing tropics, on ten days' rations of food. A very remarkable trip;
but it was conducted by a captain who was a remarkable man, otherwise
there would have been no survivors. He was a New Englander of the best
sea-going stock of the old capable times--Captain Josiah Mitchell.

I was in the islands to write letters for the weekly edition of the
Sacramento 'Union,' a rich and influential daily journal which hadn't
any use for them, but could afford to spend twenty dollars a week for
nothing. The proprietors were lovable and well-beloved men: long ago
dead, no doubt, but in me there is at least one person who still holds
them in grateful remembrance; for I dearly wanted to see the islands,
and they listened to me and gave me the opportunity when there was but
slender likelihood that it could profit them in any way.

I had been in the islands several months when the survivors arrived. I
was laid up in my room at the time, and unable to walk. Here was a great
occasion to serve my journal, and I not able to take advantage of it.
Necessarily I was in deep trouble. But by good luck his Excellency Anson
Burlingame was there at the time, on his way to take up his post in
China, where he did such good work for the United States. He came and
put me on a stretcher and had me carried to the hospital where the
shipwrecked men were, and I never neede