Elmira, Jan. 28 ’70. 
Friend Bliss,--.....  Yes, I am satisfied with the way you are running the
book.   You are running it in staving, tip-top, first-class style.   I
never wander into any corner of the country but I find that an agent has
been there before me, and many of that community have read the book.   And
on an average about ten people a day come and hunt me up to thank me and
tell me I’m a benefactor!   I guess this is a part of the programme we
didn’t expect in the first place.

I think you are rushing this book in a manner to be proud of; and you will make the finest success of it that has ever been made with a subscription book, I believe.  What with advertising, establishing agencies, &c., you have got an enormous lot of machinery under way and hard at work in a wonderfully short space of time.  It is easy to see, when one travels around, that one must be endowed with a deal of genuine generalship in order to maneuvre a publication whose line of battle stretches from end to end of a great continent, and whose foragers and skirmishers invest every hamlet and besiege every village hidden away in all the vast space between.

I’ll back you against any publisher in America, Bliss—­or elsewhere. 
                                        Yrs as ever
          
                                        Clemens.

There is another letter written just at this time which of all letters must not be omitted here.  Only five years earlier Mark Twain, poor, and comparatively unknown, had been carrying water while Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker washed out the pans of dirt in search of the gold pocket which they did not find.  Clemens must have received a letter from Gillis referring to some particular occasion, but it has disappeared; the reply, however, always remained one of James Gillis’s treasured possessions.

              To James Gillis, in his cabin on Jackass Hill,
                         Tuolumne Co., California: 

Elmira, N.Y.  Jan. 26, ’70.  Dear Jim,—­I remember that old night just as well!  And somewhere among my relics I have your remembrance stored away.  It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days.  Still, it shouldn’t—­for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.  You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angels’ Camp I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it, out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed.  I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—­I was just that blind.  But then we were so hard up!  I published that