Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/413

 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

just below St. Louis, fired two shots through her chimneys.

Brought up in a slaveholding atmosphere, Mark Twain naturally sympathized at first with the South. In June he joined the Confederates in Rails County, Missouri, as a second lieutenant under General Tom Harris. His military career lasted for two weeks. Narrowly missing the distinction of being captured by Colonel Ulysses S. Grant, he resigned, explaining that he had become &quot; incapacitated by fatigue&quot; through persistent retreating. In his sub sequent writings he has always treated his brief experience of warfare as a burlesque episode, although the official reports and correspondence of the Con federate commanders speak very respectfully of the work of the raw countrymen of the Harris Brigade. The elder Clemens brother, Orion, was persona grata to the Administration of President Lincoln, and received in consequence an appointment as the first Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada. He offered his speedily reconstructed junior the position of private secretary to himself, &quot;with nothing to do and no salary.&quot; The two crossed the plains in the Overland coach in eighteen days almost precisely the time it will take to go from New York to Vladi vostok when the Trans-Siberian Railway is finished.

A year of variegated fortune-hunting among the silver-mines of the Humboldt and Esmeralda regions followed. Occasional letters written during this time to the leading newspaper of the territory, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, attracted the attention of the proprietor, Mr. J. T. Goodman, a

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