I am taking life easy, now, and I mean to keep it up for awhile.  I don’t work at night any more.  I told the “Call” folks to pay me $25 a week and let me work only in daylight.  So I get up at ten every morning, and quit work at five or six in the afternoon.  You ask if I work for greenbacks?  Hardly.  What do you suppose I could do with greenbacks here?

I have engaged to write for the new literary paper—­the “Californian” —­same pay I used to receive on the “Golden Era”—­one article a week, fifty dollars a month.  I quit the “Era,” long ago.  It wasn’t high-toned enough.  The “Californian” circulates among the highest class of the community, and is the best weekly literary paper in the United States —­and I suppose I ought to know.

I work as I always did—­by fits and starts.  I wrote two articles last night for the Californian, so that lets me out for two weeks.  That would be about seventy-five dollars, in greenbacks, wouldn’t it?

Been down to San Jose (generally pronounced Sannozay—­emphasis on last syllable)—­today fifty miles from here, by railroad.  Town of 6,000 inhabitants, buried in flowers and shrubbery.  The climate is finer than ours here, because it is not so close to the ocean, and is protected from the winds by the coast range.

I had an invitation today, to go down on an excursion to San Luis Obispo, and from thence to the city of Mexico, to be gone six or eight weeks, or possibly longer, but I could not accept, on account of my contract to act as chief mourner or groomsman at Steve’s wedding.

I have triumphed.  They refused me and other reporters some information at a branch of the Coroner’s office—­Massey’s undertaker establishment, a few weeks ago.  I published the wickedest article on them I ever wrote in my life, and you can rest assured we got all the information we wanted after that.

By the new census, San Francisco has a population of 130,000.  They don’t
count the hordes of Chinamen. 
                                   Yrs aftly,
          
                                   Sam.

I send a picture for Annie, and one for Aunt Ella—­that is, if she will have it.

Relations with the Call ceased before the end of the year, though not in the manner described in Roughing It.  Mark Twain loved to make fiction of his mishaps, and to show himself always in a bad light.  As a matter of fact, he left the Call with great willingness, and began immediately contributing a daily letter to the Enterprise, which brought him a satisfactory financial return.

In the biographical sketch with which this volume opens, and more extendedly elsewhere, has been told the story of the trouble growing out of the Enterprise letters, and of Mark Twain’s sojourn with James Gillis in the Tuolumne Hills.  Also how, in the frowsy hotel at Angel’s Camp, he heard the frog anecdote that would become