"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is an 1865 short story by Mark Twain. It was his first great success as a writer and brought him national attention. The story has also been published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. The narrator describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."
“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; first published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press, 18 November 1865; revised by the author and reprinted the following month in The Californian; first anthologized in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17 (1867), ed. John Paul
“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865)
