“Eh bien!  I no see not that that frog has nothin of better than another.”

Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel, until that which at last he said: 

“I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused.  Is it that she had something?  One would believe that she is stuffed.”

He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said: 

“The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:” 

He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le malheureux, etc.).  When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad.  He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he not him caught never.

Such is the jumping Frog, to the distorted French eye.  I claim that I never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens in my life.  And what has a poor foreigner like me done, to be abused and misrepresented like this?  When I say, “Well, I don’t see no pints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog,” is it kind, is it just, for this Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, “Eh bien!  I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog”?  I have no heart to write more.  I never felt so about anything before.

Hartford, March, 1875.

Journalism in Tennessee—­[Written about 1871.]

The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted him as a Radical:—­“While he was writing the first word, the middle, dotting his i’s, crossing his t’s, and punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood.”—­Exchange.

I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor.  When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table.  There was another pine table in the room and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of manuscript.  There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge.  The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants.  His boots were small and neatly blacked.  He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal-ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down.  Date of costume about 1848.  He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal.  He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial.  He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest.