Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches

A frog sits heavy as a churn with a double handful of quail shot in him, and forty dollars walks out the door in a stranger's pocket. That sketch made Mark Twain famous, and this gathering follows his voice out from it across every small form he worked: the tall tale told straight-faced, the after-dinner speech built so the laugh lands three beats late, the newspaper burlesque, the essay that opens genial and ends with its teeth out.