When he was seventeen he went back to the home of his boyhood resolved to become a pilot on the Mississippi.  How he learnt the river he has told us in ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ wherein his adventures, his experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub-pilot are recorded with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of autobiography.  The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in the pages of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson.’  But toward the end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy as a carrier; and in the beginning of the sixties the Civil War broke out and the Mississippi no longer went unvext to the sea.  The skill, slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling.  As a border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting, not knowing which way to turn.  The ex-pilot has given us the record of his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South.  When this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the northwest with his brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada.  Thus the man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone East as a jour printer, who had been again and again up and down the Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the most precious of his possessions.

While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two signed “Mark Twain”—­taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead and who cries “By the mark, three,” “Mark twain,” and so on.  In Nevada he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in ’Roughing It,’ but when he failed to “strike it rich,” he naturally drifted into journalism and back into a newspaper office again.  The ’Virginia City Enterprise’ was not overmanned, and the new-comer did all sorts of odd jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important enough to permit of his signature.  The name of Mark Twain soon began to be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor.  After a while he was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual employment on the ‘Morning Call,’ and where he joined himself to a little group of aspiring literators which included Bret Harte, Noah Brooks, Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddart.