Sam Clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy delight in this knock-down humor of the Comstock.  It appealed to his vigorous, elemental nature.  He seldom indulged physically in such things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim.

Among the Enterprise compositors was one by the name of Stephen E. Gillis (Steve, of course—­one of the “fighting Gillises"), a small, fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like needle-points.

“Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds,” Mark Twain once wrote of him, “but it was well known throughout the Territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might.”

Clemens was fond of Steve Gillis from the first.  The two became closely associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but Steve was a merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he “resist the temptation of making Sam swear,” claiming that his profanity was grander than any music.

A word hereabout Mark Twain’s profanity.  Born with a matchless gift of phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it in a rare perfection.  To hear him denounce a thing was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves.  Every characterization seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next.  And somehow his profanity was seldom an offense.  It was not mere idle swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious.  His selection of epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source—­and it might be from the Bible or the gutter.  Some one has defined dirt as misplaced matter.  It is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered.  It is absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering Mark Twain’s profanity.  For it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not often offend.  It seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine.  When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle; forgiving, and even tender.  Once following an outburst he said, placidly: 

“In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

It seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but with good conscience and clear intent.