Awhile back, an email correspondent with a Finnish email name, SisuSuku, sent me the following, inquiring as to whether I though Twain had plagiarized the passage. My response at the time was that he embellished a good idea, using a concept borrowed from another. Not literal plagiarism, and something often done by writers. It doesn't mean Twain had not seen the effect; simply that the "balloon voyages" concept was not original to him. I don't see it as plagiarism. But I would appreciate Comment from others. Bob Stewart In the December, 1868, Overland Monthly., Ben Avery wrote: "[The water of Lake Tahoe] is wonderfully transparent, and the sensation upon floating over and gazing into its still bosom, where the gray granite bowlders can be seen far, far below, and large trout dart swiftly, incapable of concealment, is almost akin to that one might feel in a balloon above the earth. The color of the water changes with its depth, from a light blueish green near the shore, to a darker green further out, and finally to a blue so deep that artists hardly dare put it on canvas. . . ." In Roughing It (1872) Twain wrote: "So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's- breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions 'balloon-voyages.' "