The Celebrated Jumping Frog and Other Stories
Short story by Mark Twain, first published in The Saturday Press in 1865.  The narrator of the story, who is searching for a Reverend Leonidas Smiley, visits the long-winded Simon Wheeler, a miner, in hopes of learning his whereabouts. Wheeler instead relates an elaborate story of a different man named Jim Smiley who was a compulsive and imaginative gambler and who once spent three months training a frog named Daniel Webster to jump and then won money by betting on the frog. The gambler, Wheeler reveals, was eventually duped by a quick-thinking stranger.  --The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.