Excerpt from The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: And Other Sketches After Jenkins, Lucretia Smith's Soldier, The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized, An Item which the Editor Himself could not Understand, Among the Spirits, Brief Biographical Sketch of George Washington A Touching Story of George Washington's Boyhood, A Page from a Californian Almanac, Information for the Million. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The short story by Mark Twain. It was his first great success as a writer and brought him national attention. In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. The narrator describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."