The Project Gutenberg EBook of Roughing It, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: Roughing It

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: August 18, 2006 [EBook #3177]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUGHING IT ***

Produced by David Widger

ROUGHING IT

by Mark Twain

1880

TO
CALVIN H. HIGBIE,
Of California,
an Honest Man, a Genial Comrade, and a Steadfast Friend.
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
By the Author,
In Memory of the Curious Time
When We Two
WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS.

ROUGHING IT

BY
MARK TWAIN.
(SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.)

PREFATORY.

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history
or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of
variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting
reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad
him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information
concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about
which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in
person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude
to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada
-a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind,
that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely
to occur in it.

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the
book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped:
information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar
of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to