It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself.  Goodman let the boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any subject.  Often they wrote of each other—­squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.—­[The indifference to ‘news’ was noble—­none the less so because it was so blissfully unconscious.  Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch:  “Arthur McEwen"]—­It was the proper class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging audience and free utterance:  fortune could have devised nothing better for him than that.

He was peculiarly fitted for the position.  Unspoiled humanity appealed to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape forms.  Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially optimistic—­so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune.

His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering.  Remembering marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news.  He could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the day’s budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error.  He was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics —­measurements and figures—­were concerned.  These he gave “a lick and a promise,” according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of their associations.  De Quille says further: 

Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the items of news he could handle best, and I such as I felt competent to work up.  However, we wrote at the same table and frequently helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters of importance.  Never was there an angry word between us in all the time we worked together.

De Quille tells how Clemens clipped items with a knife when there were no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in time took on the semblance “of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing forth a thousand rays.”

The author of ‘Roughing It’ has given us a better picture of the Virginia City of those days and his work there than any one else will ever write.  He has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how “feet” in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how any one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the market.  He has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal days.  The funeral of Buck Fanshaw that amazing masterpiece—­is a complete epitome of the social frontier.