Pamela, you wouldn’t do for a local reporter—­because you don’t appreciate the interest that attaches to names.  An item is of no use unless it speaks of some person, and not then, unless that person’s name is distinctly mentioned.  The most interesting letter one can write, to an absent friend, is one that treats of persons he has been acquainted with rather than the public events of the day.  Now you speak of a young lady who wrote to Hollie Benson that she had seen me; and you didn’t mention her name.  It was just a mere chance that I ever guessed who she was—­but I did, finally, though I don’t remember her name, now.  I was introduced to her in San Francisco by Hon. A. B. Paul, and saw her afterwards in Gold Hill.  They were a very pleasant lot of girls—­she and her sisters.

P. S. I have just heard five pistol shots down street—­as such things are in my line, I will go and see about it.

P. S. No 2—­5 A.M.—­The pistol did its work well—­one man—­a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends, (police officers,) through the heart—­both died within three minutes.  Murderer’s name is John Campbell.

The “Unreliable” of this letter was a rival reporter on whom Mark Twain had conferred this name during the legislative session.  His real name was Rice, and he had undertaken to criticize Clemens’s reports.  The brisk reply that Rice’s letters concealed with a show of parliamentary knowledge a “festering mass of misstatements the author of whom should be properly termed the ’Unreliable,” fixed that name upon him for life.  This burlesque warfare delighted the frontier and it did not interfere with friendship.  Clemens and Rice were constant associates, though continually firing squibs at each other in their respective papers—­a form of personal journalism much in vogue on the Comstock.

In the next letter we find these two journalistic “blades” enjoying themselves together in the coast metropolis.  This letter is labeled “No. 2,” meaning, probably, the second from San Francisco, but No. 1 has disappeared, and even No, 2 is incomplete.

To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis: 

No. 2—­($20.00 Enclosed)
                                        Lick house, S. F., June 1, ’63. 
My Dear mother and sister,—­The Unreliable and myself are still here, and still enjoying ourselves.  I suppose I know at least a thousand people here—­a, great many of them citizens of San Francisco, but the majority belonging in Washoe—­and when I go down Montgomery street, shaking hands with Tom, Dick and Harry, it is just like being in Main street in Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces.  I do hate to go back to Washoe.  We fag ourselves completely out every day, and go to sleep without rocking, every night.  We dine out and we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—­as it were.  After breakfast, I don’t often