The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (with original illustrations)

This is Twain’s most famous short story; Jim Smiley’s Frog is familiar to readers all over the world. Its appearance in the “Saturday Press” newspaper in 1865 brought Twain nation-wide attention. This compilation includes the original “Jumping Frog” tale, the French translation published in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” in 1872, and Twain's hilarious word-for-word literal translation back to English. The later “Private History” discusses the revelation of a parallel story centuries earlier in ancient Greece, with a wry addendum.------A brief excerpt --- Jim Smiley didn't only keep frogs:Quote:“Thish-yer Smiley had a mare — the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than that — and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards’ start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she’d get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side among the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose — and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.” Read more