He made the trip afoot with a young Ohio lad, John Kinney, and the account of this trip as set down in ‘Roughing It’ is one of the best things in the book.  The lake proved all they had expected—­more than they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like floating high aloft in mid-nothingness.  They staked out a timber claim and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude:  wandering among the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent, insubstantial sea.  They did not sleep in their house, he says: 

“It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough.  We did not wish to strain it.”

They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one day—­it was just at nightfall—­it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fence and habitation.  His picture in ‘Roughing It’ of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid.  The reader may wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to Pamela at the time.

The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air.  Then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror.  The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive.  Occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say, “Superb, magnificent!—­beautifull—­but—­by the Lord God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night, we’ll never live till morning!”

This is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of phrasing which would develop later.  The fire ended their first excursion to Tahoe, but they made others and located other claims—­claims in which the “folks at home,” Mr. Moffett, James Lampton, and others, were included.  It was the same James Lampton who would one day serve as a model for Colonel Sellers.  Evidently Samuel Clemens had a good opinion of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes: 

    This is just the country for cousin Jim to live in.  I don’t believe
    it would take him six months to make $100,000 here if he had $3,000
    to commence with.  I suppose he can’t leave his family, though.

Further along in the same letter his own overflowing Seller’s optimism develops.