The Era rooms were elegant—­[he says]—­,the most grandly carpeted and most gorgeously furnished that I have ever seen.  Even now in my memory they seem to have been simply palatial.  I have seen the world well since then—­all of its splendors worth seeing—­yet those carpeted parlors, with Joe Lawrence and his brilliant satellites, outshine all things else, as I turn to look back.

More than any other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras, which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several years.  They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as if it had been a great deal more.  They felt that they were creating literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of American letters mustered there.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte were distinctive features of this group.  They were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he would be remembered later.  They were a good deal together, and it was when Harte was made editor of the Californian that Mark Twain was put on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate.  The Californian made larger pretensions than the Era, and perhaps had a heavier financial backing.  With Mark Twain on the staff and Bret Harte in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first of San Francisco periodicals.  A number of the sketches collected by Webb later, in Mark Twain’s first little volume, the Celebrated Jumping Frog, Etc., appeared in the Era or Californian in 1864 and 1865.  They were smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor of the day.  Some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches.  They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough.  “The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized” is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad.  The Answers to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period.  The Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest.  It has a history of its own, as we shall see a little further along.

The reportorial arrangement was of brief duration.  Even the great San Francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in Mark Twain any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the ‘Call’.  He had lost interest, and when Mark Twain lost interest in a subject or an undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as he was concerned.  His conclusion of service with the Call was certain, and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long.