We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents—­we were always
    talking of such things; then he said: 

“Boys, I had great presence of mind once.  It was at a fire.  An old man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help.  Everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything.  The ladders weren’t long enough.  Nobody had any presence of mind—­nobody but me.  I came to the rescue.  I yelled for a rope.  When it came I threw the old man the end of it.  He caught it and I told him to tie it around his waist.  He did so, and I pulled him down.”

This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far.  Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for Horace Bixby remembers that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel.”

But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later—­with one exception.  The exception was not intended for publication, either.  It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends.  He has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.

That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers—­a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge.  He contributed paragraphs of general information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and signed them “Mark Twain.”  They were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning:  “My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as 1811.

Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech.  But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed “Sergeant Fathom,” with an introduction which referred to the said Fathom as “one of the oldest cub pilots on the river.”  The letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer “the old first Jubilee” with a “Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.”  It is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.—­[See Appendix B, at the end of the last volume.]

The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens’s pilot partner on the Edward J. Gay at the time.  He insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it.  Clemens was reluctant, but consented.  It appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and boisterously enjoyed.

It broke Captain Sellers’s literary heart.  He never contributed another paragraph.  Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly wounded.  If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved —­immortality.