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Pastimes : Laughter is the Best Medicine - Tell us a joke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Calvin Scott who wrote (18427)	3/14/2001 2:31:33 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 62551

A story about something green, a famous frog..from 1912 bio about Mark Twain: "In the winter of 1864 and 1865, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his friend Jim Gillis panned for gold not far from Angel's Camp in Calaveras County. It was a cold, rainy winter during which Twain and Gillis spent more time in the Angel's Camp tavern than in the hills panning for gold. There they enjoyed listening to former Illinois river pilot, Ben Coon tell his stories slowly, humorlessly. One time Ben recounted the story of a frog belonging to a local man named Coleman. He had trained it to jump, but failed to win a sure bet because the owner of the rival frog loaded Coleman's jumper with shot. Twain wrote: the 'spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd.' . One day , Twain and Gillis followed some promising specks of gold leading them up a long slope when an icy downpour soaked them both. Twain, who carried the buckets of water to Gillis, was wet through and he finally said, "Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable." "Bring one more pail, Sam," Gillis pleaded. "No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan." So Gillis posted a thirty-day claim notice by the pan and he and Twain went back to Angel's Camp, Gillis' brother had requested they come to San Francisco, and they did. After they had left the claim, two Austrians who had come along found that the rain had washed away the dirt exposing nuggets of gold. They waited patiently for Gillis' notice to expire after which they took ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars from that claim. Mark Twain had missed it by one pail of water. Yet Jim Gillis always declared, "If Sam had got that pocket he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me." In Twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story: 'Coleman with his jumping frog -- bet stranger $50 -- stranger had no frog, and C. got him one: -- in the mean time stranger filled C.'s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won.' It seemed unimportant enough at the time, but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame"