I was inspired, while reediting Chapter 32 of Roughing It, wherein Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) believes he and his partners, Ollendorf and Ballou, are going to freeze to death in a winter storm in the Carson desert, to record a version of Jack London's To Build a Fire. This is a tale of a man without the proper respect for nature and as London remarks, without imagination. While hiking toward his mining claim on Henderson Creek he breaks through an ice layer and steps into a spring wetting his legs near to his knees. The temperature is 75 degrees below zero.

One of those great lines from Groucho Marx, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member", appears to have roots in Mark Twain. "I wouldn't have a girl that (I thought) I was worthy of. She wouldn't do. She wouldn't be respectable enough."