I have always enjoyed the Mark Twain Forum for the lively exchanges and the passion that folks show for all things Mark Twain, but the best part is the way the forum turns into a quick seminar on a topic. My shoot-from-the-hip generalization about the SF DRAMATIC CHRONICLE's bantering style of presenting local items as well as my speculation about the probability of Clemens being stoned vs drunk yielded a thoughtful admonition from Bob Hirst and lots of contextual info from Barb Schmidt and Jim Zwick. So...I take it all back. Well,... most of it. Certainly the contextual info about published references over a long time period, which increases the odds of probable availability, make me much more ready to believe that Sam Clemens, living a Bohemian life-style in San Francisco, would not have had difficulty finding the drug if he wished to sample hashish. Certainly Bob Hirst is correct to say that the CHRONICLE'S crew like to attack the stuffed-shirt crowd represented by Albert Evans. Mark Twain had his own long-running series of comic slams against "Stiggers," and the CALIFORNIAN was still making fun of Evans even after Clemens had sailed for New York at the end of 1866. But...there are times when bantering within the ranks happens. I am thinking of the joke when Clemens was about to give his first "lecture" on the Sandwich Islands in October of 1866. Supposedly Mark Twain was so nervous that he tried to leave town, and was only prevented with the aid of a policemen and several bottles of "Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup." Maybe that is not a typical example in its obvious comic level. I only ran across it recently reading the CHRONICLE files--while looking for something else. So I wasn't trying to calculate a style for the paper in a systematic way. However, the piece about Clemens and Johns being stoned does not have any of the obviously broad comic touches that the item about the lecture does, which, when I went back and looked at it again, makes me agree with Bob Hirst that one ought to read it as a report rather than a comic dig. My thanks to all for the collegial schooling.