He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view.  Jane Clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing.  He had expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea—­a literary idea—­came to him, and he returned to Keokuk.  The Saturday Post, a Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs.  He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the Post—­for, a consideration.  He may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness.  Rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each—­good payment for that time and place.  The young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis according to his first letter in the Post.—­[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]

This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a promising literary production.  It was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between.  The genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one.  The letter is a burlesque account of the trip to Cincinnati.  A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve.

I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o’ yaller paper, cut up into tickets—­one for each railroad in the United States, I thought, but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line was left out—­and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin’ it open and shakin’ out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and “guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers’ guides, and all kinds of sich books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you.  Finally, that fast packet quit ringing her bell, and started down the river—­but she hadn’t gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar she stuck till plum one o’clock, spite of the Captain’s swearin’ —­and they had to set the whole crew to cussin’ at last afore they got her off.

This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward.  Only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain.  The letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them.  The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on his hands.