His doubts were speedily resolved; and he
afterwards confessed that, had he been offered at that time a salary to
translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly
have accepted, despite some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw
as much variety into it as he could for the money. It was to fill a
vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter,
on a visit to "the States," that Clemens was offered this position; but
he retained it after De Quille returned. "Mark and I had our hands
full," relates De Quille, "and no grass grew under our feet. There was
a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another
as though playing at leap-frog. While a stage robbery was being written
up, a shooting affray started; and perhaps before the pistol shots had
ceased to echo among the surrounding hills, the firebells were banging
out an alarm." A record of the variegated duties of these two, found in
an old copy of the Territorial Enterprise of 1863, bears the
unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain.
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