If they want letters from here—­who’ll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper?  I’ll write a short letter twice a week, for the present for the ‘Age’, for $5 per week.  Now it has been a long time since I couldn’t make my own living, and it shall be a long time before I loaf another year.

Nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time Barstow, of the Enterprise, conferred with Joseph T. Goodman, editor and owner of the paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the “Josh” letters to their local staff.  Joe Goodman, who had as keen a literary perception as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the Pacific coast (and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters and agreed with Barstow that the man who wrote them had “something in him.”  Two of the sketches in particular he thought promising.  One of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred to as “Professor Personal Pronoun.”  It closed by stating that it was “impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out of capital I’s.”  But it was the other sketch which settled Goodman’s decision.  It was also a burlesque report, this time of a Fourth-of-July oration.  It opened, “I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam.”  This was followed by a string of stock patriotic phrases absurdly arranged.  But it was the opening itself that won Goodman’s heart.

“That is the sort of thing we want,” he said.  “Write to him, Barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here.”

Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum.  This was at the end of July, 1862.

In ‘Roughing It’ we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway.  As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the “call.”  To Orion he wrote Barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at $25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail, if possible.

There was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions.  It meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure.  On August 7th he wrote again to Orion.  He had written to Barstow, he said, asking when they thought he might be needed.  He was playing for time to consider.

Now, I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of 60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally “slow.”  But do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you.