Mark Twain Collection

Start-to-Finish: Gold The Start-to-Finish Gold collection is a high-interest considerate reading series designed to promote independent reading for struggling readers aged 9 to 17 years but reading at the 2nd-3rd grade level. Each set consist of a paperback book, a computer CD ROM book, an audio book and a teacher's guide. NOTE: A portable USB DVD writer is available for loan if your computer system does not have a CD/DVD drive. This collection contains the following short stories written by Mark Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: After swindling his fellows with other wild gambles, Jim trains a frog as a champion jumper. But the last laugh is on Jim. And to this day, Calaveras County still holds an annual frog-jumping contest. A Curious Dream: Suppose you were sitting on your porch late one night, and a skeleton stopped at your gate to tell you that the local cemetery was so run-down that he was looking for a better place to be buried? That’s how this eerie, funny Halloween yarn begins. A Story from Life on the Mississippi: In this portion of Twain’s great memoir, Twain portrays his boyhood love of steamboats and his early comic yet serious efforts to become the greatest of men: a pilot on the vast, mysterious, dangerous Mississippi River in the days before the Civil War.