a cur’us brownish-yaller-greenbluish color in it, which was perfectly unaccountable.  ‘Well,’ say I, ‘comment is super-flu-ous.’”

How Samuel Clemens could have written that, and worse, at twenty-one, and a little more than ten years later have written “The Innocents Abroad,” is one of the mysteries of literature.  The letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them.  Snodgrass seems to have found them hard work, for it is said he raised on the price, which, fortunately, brought the series to a close.  Their value to-day lies in the fact that they are the earliest of Mark Twain’s newspaper contributions that have been preserved—­the first for which he received a cash return.

Sam remained in Cincinnati until April of the following year, 1857, working for Wrightson & Co., general printers, lodging in a cheap boarding-house, saving every possible penny for his great adventure.

He had one associate at the boarding-house, a lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, twice young Clemens’s age, and a good deal of a mystery.  Sam never could find out what Macfarlane did.  His hands were hardened by some sort of heavy labor; he left at six in the morning and returned in the evening at the same hour.  He never mentioned his work, and young Clemens had the delicacy not to inquire.

For Macfarlane was no ordinary person.  He was a man of deep knowledge, a reader of many books, a thinker; he was versed in history and philosophy, he knew the dictionary by heart.  He made but two statements concerning himself:  one, that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school; the other, that he knew every word in the English dictionary.  He was willing to give proof of the last, and Sam Clemens tested him more than once, but found no word that Macfarlane could not define.

Macfarlane was not silent—­he would discuss readily enough the deeper problems of life and had many startling theories of his own.  Darwin had not yet published his “Descent of Man,” yet Macfarlane was already advancing ideas similar to those in that book.  He went further than Darwin.  He had startling ideas of the moral evolution of man, and these he would pour into the ears of his young listener until ten o’clock, after which, like the English Sumner in Philadelphia, he would grill a herring, and the evening would end.  Those were fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane’s room, and they did not fail to influence his later thought.

It was the high-tide of spring, late in April, when the prospective cocoa-hunter decided that it was time to set out for the upper Amazon.  He had saved money enough to carry him at least as far as New Orleans, where he would take ship, it being farther south and therefore nearer his destination.  Furthermore, he could begin with a lazy trip down the Mississippi, which, next to being a pilot, had been one of his most cherished dreams.  The Ohio River steamers were less grand than those of the Mississippi, but they had a homelike atmosphere and did not hurry.  Samuel Clemens had the spring fever and was willing to take his time.