Which brings us to Mark Twain.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens is too well known both by his works and by his life to need any word of comment. His whole career, as printer, pilot, lecturer and writer is an open and conned book to all.
Difficult indeed it is to quote from his volumes of fun, but we append a short extract from The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
... Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres all said he laid over any frog that ever they see.
Well, Smiley kep’ the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller—a stranger in the camp, he was—come acrost him with his box, and says:
“What might it be that you’ve got in the box?”
And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, “It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, maybe, but it ain’t—it’s only just a frog.”
And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, “H’m—so ’tis. Well what’s he good for?”
“Well,” Smiley says, easy and careless, “he’s good enough for one thing, I should judge—he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.”
The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, “Well,” he says, “I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”