Here is an extract from an unpublished essay by me about this Frog matter.

Recalling the story almost thirty years after publication, in “Private
History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (1894) he writes of “the smartness of
its hero, Jim Smiley, in taking the stranger in with a loaded frog” and of
“Smiley’s deep knowledge of a frog’s nature—for he knew . . . that a
frog *likes
shot* and is always ready to eat it.” The motivation behind the erroneous
belief that Smiley hobbles the stranger’s animal, and wins the bet, must be
substantial when even Mark Twain falls victim to it. The reflections that
follow are prompted by the (possibly unjustified) feeling that there must
be something to learn from the way the Jumping Frog story lends itself to
memorial deformation.

Mark Twain reprinted the “Private History” essay, with his mistake
uncorrected, in two collections: *How to Tell a Story* (1897) and *The Man
That Corrupted Hadleyburg* (1900). When it came to be prepared for
inclusion in the collected editions published in 1900, the publisher,
Francis E. Bliss of the American Publishing Company (or someone in his
employ) noticed the author’s error. Bliss wrote to Clemens on the
page-proof:



Dear Clemens,

I suppose those sentences on other side are just as you intended them, as
they ̭are just as they have been printed in other places; but they are
exactly the *reverse* of the original story you know—

If by any chance you want to change them let ’em come right back *quick* as
we are ready for press nearly.


From London, Clemens replied: “Correct the discrepancies; make any changes
you like.” He was evidently quite unembarrassed by, and uninterested in,
his lapse of memory. Bliss switched Clemens's references to “Smiley” and
“the stranger” so as to conform to the original tale. The collected
editions from that point onward use the revised wording, accurately
reflecting the plot; Clemens’s blunder, of course, remained accessible in
the many uncorrected printings. Harper and Brothers perpetuated the
uncorrected form of the essay in their 1903 publication *The Jumping Frog
in English, Then in French* . . . (60–61). In 1909 the author’s lapse was
first noted in print by Julia Lawrence Shafter, an amateur writer for
magazines who had happened to read the uncorrected version (“A Lapse of
Mark Twain’s,” *The Writer* 21 [August 1909], 115). Albert Bigelow Paine’s
collection *In Defense of Harriet Shelley* (Harper, 1918) used the
corrected version (102).

-- 
Benjamin Griffin
Associate Editor, Mark Twain Project
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000
(510) 664-4238