As for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings for a considerable time.  The telegraph did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast.  When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author.  Even Artemus Ward’s opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain’s regard for it as literature.  That it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work.  In a letter written January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 

    I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful.  I wish I was
    back there piloting up and down the river again.  Verily, all is
    vanity and little worth—­save piloting.

To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!  “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—­a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.

    But no matter.  His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally
    speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear
    between its covers.

This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta: 

“Mark Twain’s story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark.  I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near.  It is voted the best thing of the day.  Cannot the ‘Californian’ afford to keep Mark all to itself?  It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California press.”

    The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co. gave the sketch to
    the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.

It is difficult to judge the jumping Frog story to-day.  It has the intrinsic fundamental value of one of AEsop’s Fables.—­[The resemblance of the frog story to the early Greek tales must have been noted by Prof.  Henry Sidgwick, who synopsized it in Greek form and phrase for his book, Greek Prose Composition.  Through this originated the impression that the story was of Athenian root.  Mark Twain himself was deceived, until in 1899, when he met Professor Sidgwick, who explained that the Greek version was the translation and Mark Twain’s the original; that he had thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known.  See The Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]—­It contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm.  It appeared in print at a time