SOURCE: "The Ancestor of the 'Jumping Frog'," in The Bookman, Vol. 53, No. 1, April, 1921, pp. 143-45.

In the following essay, Morrissey recounts a Virginia tale about a man and a trained grasshopper, claiming it to be a prototype of Twain's jumping frog story.

Occasionally it is given to lesser mortals not only to read the fiction of the gifted ones, but also to glimpse the skeleton of truth upon which the wordy flesh has been grown. For some such an experience holds no more of romance than watching a play from the wings; for other, more blessed, souls the insight serves to arouse further admiration at the deft touches that have made fancy far more pleasant than fact.

In those golden days in Virginia City of which Mark Twain writes so vividly in Roughing It there were four men whose names were linked like a Mexican puzzle ring—Mackay...