What there was of it rested upon the story of "The Jumping Frog." When Artemus Ward passed through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or '66, I told him the "Jumping Frog" story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price which was to be charged for it.
It reached Carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book.

He did not put it in the waste-basket, but made Henry Clapp a present of it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary journal, _The Saturday Press_.

"The Jumping Frog" appeared in the last number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England.

It certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I am speaking of--but I was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated.

It wasn't I.I was still an obscurity.
Webb undertook to collate the sketches.