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.