Humor Twain, Mark: The Jumping Frog (Illustrated). v1. 11 Nov 2012

[GrannyGrump]

THE JUMPING FROG
Being a Compendium of the Writings of Mark Twain Concerning the Celebrated Frog

by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910)
with 12 Illustrations by F. Strothmann (1879 – 1958)
First published 1865 / 1872 / 1875 / 1894 / 1903.

The text of this book, published before 1923, is in the public domain world-wide because the author died more than 100 years ago. The illustrations are in the public domain in countries where copyright is Life+50, and in the USA.

Mark Twain is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel." Among dozens of titles, some of his works include The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and many more.

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.

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A brief excerpt --- Jim Smiley didn't only keep frogs:

“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.”

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Formatted punctuation and italics, restored diacritics (an extreme challenge to someone who speaks not a word of French!). Chapter headings and picture captions are cross-linked to the inline table of contents. Drop-caps and Large-caps versions.

Have a laugh, compliments of Mr. Twain.