d follow. Once the office force, including De
Quille, McCarthy, and a printer named Stephen Gillis, of whom Clemens was
very fond, bought a large imitation meerschaum pipe, had a German-silver
plate set on it, properly engraved, and presented it to Samuel Clemens as
genuine, in testimony of their great esteem. His reply to the
presentation speech was so fine and full of feeling that the jokers felt
ashamed of their trick. A few days later, when he discovered the
deception, he was ready to destroy the lot of them. Then, in atonement,
they gave him a real meerschaum. Such things kept the Comstock
entertained.

There was a side to Samuel Clemens that, in those days, few of his
associates saw. This was the poetic, the reflective side. Joseph
Goodman, like Macfarlane in Cincinnati several years earlier, recognized
this phase of his character and developed it. Often these two, dining or
walking together, discussed the books and history they had read, quoted
from poems that gave them pleasure. Clemens sometimes recited with great
power the "Burial of Moses," whose noble phrasing and majestic imagery
seemed to move him deeply. With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a
lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of
the stately lines:

By Nebo's lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan's wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab
There lies a lonely grave.
And no man knows that sepulcher,
And no man saw it e'er,
For the angels of God upturned the sod,
And laid the dead man there.

That his own writing would be influenced by the simple grandeur of this
poem we can hardly doubt. Indeed, it may have been to him a sort of
literary touchstone, that in time would lead him to produce, as has been
said, some of the purest English written by any modern author.

XXII.

"MARK TWAIN"

It was once when Goodman and Clemens were dining together that the latter
asked to be allowed to report the proceedings of the coming legislature
at Carson City. He knew nothing of such work, and Goodman hesitated.
Then, remembering that Clemens would, at least, make his reports
readable, whether they were parliamentary or not, he consented.

So, at the beginning of the year (1863), Samuel Clemens undertook a new
and interesting course in the study of human nature--the political human
nature of the frontier. There could have been no better school for him.
His wit