CHAPTER VI

Beginning a Literary Epoch

HE SEEMS to have made no notes in New York,
but we know that he found there an old Cali-
fornia friend, Charles Henry Webb, who had
collected a number of Mark Twain sketches, in-
cluding the "Jumping Frog" story, with the idea
of making a book of them. When a publisher,
Carlcton, rejected the book, Webb decided to
bring it out on his own account.

After a trip to St. Louis, to see his mother
and sister, and to Hannibal, where he lectured,
Mark Twain returned to New York, watched
his book through the press, lectured at the
Cooper Institute, and as correspondent for the
Aha California, of San Francisco, and the New
York Tribune, joined the Quaker City Holy
Land Excursion, which had replaced his earlier
dream of a trip around the world.

The notes of that first Mediterranean pleas-
ure cruise, begun before the ship left the harbor,
were set down in the very midst of the pic-
turesque band of "innocents" and "pilgrims"
that gypsicd through France and Italy and trod
the arid hills of Palestine. Solid little volumes
stiffly bound in tan sheep—the pencilings some-
times hurried, sometimes deliberate, and nearly
all legible—how close they seem to bring us to

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