The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a horse!  He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by.  Of course, he would be thrown off.  Of course, any well-bred horse wouldn’t let a common, underbred person like Dan stay on his back!  When they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you’ll find him at his old place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he’s a newspaper man.

The author of ‘Roughing It’ tells of a literary periodical called the Occidental, started in Virginia City by a Mr. F. This was the silver-tongued Tom Fitch, of the Union, an able speaker and writer, vastly popular on the Coast.  Fitch came to Clemens one day and said he was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of the venture.  Clemens said: 

“You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara; set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur; start a literary paper in Virginia City; h—­l!”

Which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished with the third issue.  It was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel.  Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain’s first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit—­“The Aged Pilot Man”—­which were thereby saved for ‘Roughing It.’

Visiting Virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could have happened there.  The Comstock has become little more than a memory; Virginia and Gold Hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute scarcely an echo of the past.  The International Hotel, that once so splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now.  One may wander at will through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished day.  Those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed up and down the stair and billowed up C Street, an ebullient tide of metals and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and individuals known in national affairs.  William M. Stewart who would one day become a United States Senator, was there, an unnoticed unit; and John Mackay and James G. Fair, one a senator by and by, and both millionaires, but poor enough then—­Fair with a pick on his shoulder and Mackay, too, at first, though he presently became a mine superintendent.  Once in those days Mark Twain banteringly offered to trade businesses with Mackay.

“No,” Mackay said, “I can’t trade.  My business is not worth as much as yours.  I have never swindled anybody, and I don’t intend to begin now.”

Neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would be international property; that in due course Nevada would propose statues to their memory.