CHAPTER I

The River and the Mines

IN ONE of the final chapters of The Innocents Abroad,
Mark Twain tells of a diary he once began with the new
year: "When I was a boy and a confiding and a willing
prey to those impossible schemes of reform which well-
meaning old maids and grandmothers set for the feet of
unwary youths at that season of the yean . . . Please ac-
cept an extract:"

Monday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
Tuesday—Got up, washed, went to bed.

The diary continued this line through the week or at
least until Friday, then skipped to the next Friday, and
finally to the Friday of the following month. It seems to
have been abandoned then. He was discouraged, he says.
"Startling events appeared to be too rare, in my career,
to render a diary necessary. I still reflect with pride,
however, that even at that early age I washed when I got
up. That journal finished me. I never had the nerve to
keep one since."

That final statement is true so far as any formal and
regular diary is concerned, Mark Twain never kept a con-
sistent, orderly journal. He was not as prosaic as that.
But he was always making notes, capturing the moment
—the occurrence, the theme, the purpose, the fancy that
flitted through his mind: whatever came and went, if he
could get hold of a notebook and pencil quickly enough,
he fixed it to his page; when he couldn't he forgot, and