The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Creative Short Stories)

Review Short story by Mark Twain, first published in The Saturday Press in 1865. The narrator of the story, who is searching for a Reverend Leonidas Smiley, visits the long-winded Simon Wheeler, a miner, in hopes of learning his whereabouts. Wheeler instead relates an elaborate story of a different man named Jim Smiley who was a compulsive and imaginative gambler and who once spent three months training a frog named Daniel Webster to jump and then won money by betting on the frog. The gambler, Wheeler reveals, was eventually duped by a quick-thinking stranger. --