Certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ
materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the
writings of Mr. Clemens himself. Mark Twain’s spirit was built of the
very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his
earlier autobiographical writings—and most of his earlier writings were
autobiographical—he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place,
or circumstance—seeking, as he said, “only to tell a good story”—while
in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made
history difficult, even when, as in his so-called “Autobiography,” his
effort was in the direction of fact.
“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or
not,” he once said, quaintly, “but I am getting old, and soon I shall
remember only the latter.”
The reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer
of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources:
letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also
from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of
circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed
items.
MARK TWAIN
A BIOGRAPHY
I
ANCESTORS
On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until
his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man
of wide repute “for his want of energy,” and in a marginal note he has
written:
“I guess this is where our line starts.”
It was like him to write that. It spoke in his whimsical fashion the
attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which
was his chief characteristic and made him lovable—in his personality
and in his work.
Historically, we need not accept this identity of the Clemens ancestry.
The name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in
Rome. There was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and
again in the annals of the Middle Ages. More lately there was a Gregory
Clemens, an English landowner who became a member of Parliament under
Cromwell and signed the death-warrant of Charles I. Afterward he was
tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was
exposed on a pole on the top of Westminster Hall.
Tradition says that the family of Gregory Clemens did not remain in
England, but emigrated to Virginia (or New Jersey), and from them, in
direct line, descended the Virginia Clemenses, including John Marshall
Clemens, the father of Mark Twain. Perhaps the line could be traced,
and its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or
less need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be
written.
Of Mark Twain’s immediate forebears, however, there is something to be
said. His paternal grandfather, whose name also was Samuel, was a man
of culture and literary taste. In 1797 he married a Virginia girl,
Pamela Goggin; and of their five children John Marshall Clemens, born
August 11, 1798, was the eldest—becoming male head of the family at the
age of seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a
house-raising. The family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with
a taste for work. As a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory,
at Lynchburg, and doubtless studied at night. At all events, he
acquired an education, but injured his health in the mean time, and
somewhat later, with his mother and the younger children, removed to
Adair County, Kentucky, where the widow presently married a sweetheart
of her girlhood, one Simon Hancock, a good man. In due course, John
Clemens was sent to Columbia, the countyseat, to study law. When the
living heirs became of age he administered his father’s estate,
receiving as his own share three negro slaves; also a mahogany
sideboard, which remains among the Clemens effects to this day.
This was in 1821. John Clemens was now a young man of twenty-three,
never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution,
and a heart full of hope and dreams. Sober, industrious, and
unswervingly upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark.
That he was likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was
not then regarded as a misfortune.
It was two years later that he met Jane Lampton; whose mother was a
Casey —a Montgomery-Casey whose father was of the Lamptons (Lambtons)
of Durham, England, and who on her own account was reputed to be the
handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all
Kentucky. The Montgomeries and the Caseys of Kentucky had been Indian
fighters in the Daniel Boone period, and grandmother Casey, who had
been Jane Montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once
saved her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer.
The Montgomery and Casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures,
and there is to-day a Casey County next to Adair, with a Montgomery
County somewhat farther east. As for the Lamptons, there is an earldom
in the English family, and there were claimants even then in the
American branch. All these things were worth while in Kentucky, but it
was rare Jane Lampton herself—gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty
and her grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that
matter—that won the heart of John Marshall Clemens, swept him off his
feet almost at the moment of their meeting. Many of the characteristics
that made Mark Twain famous were inherited from his mother. His sense
of humor, his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly
her contribution to his fame. Speaking of her in a later day, he once
said:
“She had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in
woman—the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not
knowing it to be humorous.”
She bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion;
her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and
the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and
perfect setting.
It was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of Jane Lampton and
John Marshall Clemens. All her life, Jane Clemens honored her husband,
and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had
been a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and
her prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather
than tenderness. She stipulated that the wedding take place at once,
and on May 6, 1823, they were married. She was then twenty; her husband
twenty-five. More than sixty years later, when John Clemens had long
been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an Old
Settlers’ Convention, because among the names of those attending she
had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. She meant to humble
herself to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. She arrived too
late; the convention was over, and he was gone. Mark Twain once spoke
of this, and added:
“It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my
personal experience in a long lifetime.”
II
THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS
With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions,
John Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making
business mistakes. It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt—his absolute
confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead—which led him from one
unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived.
About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in
Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River, and
here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born. They named him
Orion—after the constellation, perhaps—though they changed the accent
to the first syllable, calling it Orion. Gainsborough was a small place
with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or
furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown,
Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains. Yet
Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his
fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east
Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. He took an
immediate and active interest in the development of the place,
established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was
promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court.
It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for
himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land. Grants
could be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an
acre, and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when
the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a
hundred thousandfold. There was no wrong estimate in that. Land covered
with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals,
could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire
purchase of 75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500. The
great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown.
Standing in the door of the Court House he had built, looking out over
the “Knob” of the Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he
said:
“Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. I may not live to see
these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will.”
Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the “Tennessee land,”
which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead—a golden
vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes—the dream
fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of
phantom riches, The Gilded Age.
Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come
true he was in no wise to blame. The land is priceless now, and a
corporation of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a
thin fragment of it—about one thousand acres—overlooked in some survey.
Believing the future provided for, Clemens turned his attention to
present needs. He built himself a house, unusual in its style and
elegance. It had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered
with plastering, something which no one in Jamestown had ever seen
before. He was regarded as an aristocrat. He wore a swallow-tail coat
of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. The
blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar
and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time.
His wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore
homespun linsey-woolsey. The new house was referred to as the Crystal
Palace. When John and Jane Clemens attended balls—there were continuous
balls during the holidays—they were considered the most graceful
dancers.
Jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. It attained
almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses—mainly log houses
—and stopped there. The country, too, was sparsely settled; law
practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to
court was very bad for one of his physique. John Clemens saw his
reserve of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in
merchandise. He built himself a store and put in a small country stock
of goods. These he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack,
turpentine, rosin, and other produce of the country, which he took to
Louisville every spring and fall in six-horse wagons. In the mean time
he would seem to have sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to
provide capital. There was a second baby now—a little girl,
Pamela,—born in September, 1827. Three years later, May 1830, another
little girl, Margaret, came. By this time the store and home were in
one building, the store occupying one room, the household requiring
two—clearly the family fortunes were declining.
About a year after little Margaret was born, John Clemens gave up
Jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles
distant, known as the Three Forks of Wolf. The Tennessee land was safe,
of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time
the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard.
He could not have remained at the Three Forks long, for in 1832 we find
him at still another place, on the right bank of Wolf River, where a
post-office called Pall Mall was established, with John Clemens as
postmaster, usually addressed as “Squire” or “Judge.” A store was run
in connection with the postoffice. At Pall Mall, in June, 1832, another
boy, Benjamin, was born.
The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens
himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank
of the river. He no longer practised law. In The Gilded Age we have
Mark Twain’s picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from
descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother
Orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an
exaggerated presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time. The
chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. The reader
may look it up for himself, if he chooses. If he does he will not
wonder that Jane Clemens’s handsome features had become somewhat
sharper, and her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of
marriage, or that John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune
with his environment —was rapidly getting out of heart. After all the
bright promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and
hope seemed dwindling away.
A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than
his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called
“sunpain,” an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to
all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and
intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless
community. He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his
eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. Gray and
deep-set under bushy brows, they literally looked you through.
Absolutely fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights. It is
told of John Clemens, at Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he
handed the minister on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read
from the pulpit, according to the custom of that community. For some
reason, the minister put the document aside and neglected it. At the
close of the service Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his
announcement himself to the congregation. Those who knew Mark Twain
best will not fail to recall in him certain of his father’s legacies.
The arrival of a letter from “Colonel Sellers” inviting the Hawkins
family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age. In reality the
letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens’s sister,
Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It was
a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it
shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to
do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose
memory is likely to last as long as American history.
III
A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE
Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties—smaller
than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even
if less celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested,
comparatively unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less
than half a million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great
river. St. Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its
river trade with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast
uncharted region. There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no
stage lines of any consequence—scarcely any maps. For all that one
could see or guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a
settlement like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt
River, which those early settlers believed might one day become
navigable and carry the merchandise of that region down to the mighty
Mississippi, thence to the world outside.
In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had
been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and
others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should want Jane
Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee
venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was natural,
too, for John Quarles—happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic—to write
the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles
counted stables, out-buildings—everything with a roof on it—and set
down the number at fifty-four.
Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just
the kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be
certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer.
Yet there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens
must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers
letter ends:
“Come!—rush!—hurry!—don’t wait for anything!”
The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away.
The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce
were sent to Louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few
hundred dollars, John Clemens and his family “flitted out into the
great mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee.” They
had a two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out
of their earlier fortunes. The barouche held the parents and the three
younger children, Pamela, Margaret, anal the little boy, Benjamin.
There were also two extra horses, which Orion, now ten, and Jennie, the
house-girl, a slave, rode. This was early in the spring of 1835.
They traveled by the way of their old home at Columbia, and paid a
visit to relatives. At Louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for
St. Louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude
into what was then the Far West, the promised land.
They arrived one evening, and if Florida was not quite all in
appearance that John Clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven—with
John Quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. The great
Mississippi was less than fifty miles away. Salt River, with a system
of locks and dams, would certainly become navigable to the Forks, with
Florida as its head of navigation. It was a Sellers fancy, though
perhaps it should be said here that John Quarles was not the chief
original of that lovely character in The Gilded Age. That was another
relative—James Lampton, a cousin—quite as lovable, and a builder of
even more insubstantial dreams.
John Quarles was already established in merchandise in Florida, and was
prospering in a small way. He had also acquired a good farm, which he
worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading
citizen of the community. He offered John Clemens a partnership in his
store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land.
Furthermore, he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. Thus
far, at least, the Florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever
came, matters could not be worse than they had been in Tennessee.
In a small frame building near the center of the village, John and Jane
Clemens established their household. It was a humble one-story affair,
with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough
for its size, and comparatively new. It is still standing and occupied
when these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as
a shrine for the American people; for it was here that the foremost
American-born author—the man most characteristically American in every
thought and word and action of his life—drew his first fluttering
breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to
come would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king.
It was on a bleak day, November 30, 1835, that he entered feebly the
domain he was to conquer. Long, afterward, one of those who knew him
best said:
“He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet—never
quite of this race or kind.”
He may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it
would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into
the far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. But nobody thought of
this, then.
He was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his
coming. Perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so
sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. One
Polly Ann Buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any
sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,* but she had no particular
pride in that matter then. It was only a puny baby with a wavering
promise of life. Still, John Clemens must have regarded with favor this
first gift of fortune in a new land, for he named the little boy
Samuel, after his father, and added the name of an old and dear
Virginia friend, Langhorne. The family fortunes would seem to have been
improving at this time, and he may have regarded the arrival of another
son as a good omen.
* This honor has been claimed also for Mrs. Millie Upton and a Mrs.
Damrell. Probably all were present and assisted.
With a family of eight, now, including Jennie, the slavegirl, more room
was badly needed, and he began building without delay. The result was
not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but
it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. The rooms were
larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and
dining-room uses. This house, completed in 1836, occupied by the
Clemens family during the remainder of the years spent in Florida, was
often in later days pointed out as Mark Twain’s birthplace. It missed
that distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in
having sheltered his early childhood.*
* This house is no longer standing. When it was torn down several years
ago, portions of it were carried off and manufactured into souvenirs.
Mark Twain himself disclaimed it as his birthplace, and once wrote on a
photograph of it: “No, it is too stylish, it is not my birthplace.”
IV
BEGINNING A LONG JOURNEY
It was not a robust childhood. The new baby managed to go through the
winter—a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. Added
strength came, but slowly; “Little Sam,” as they called him, was always
delicate during those early years.
It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and
contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that
embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John
Clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. He
looked after their comfort and mental development as well as he could,
and gave advice on occasion. He bought a book now and then—sometimes a
picture-book —and subscribed for Peter Parley’s Magazine, a marvel of
delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements,
and he rarely, or never, laughed. Mark Twain did not remember ever
having seen or heard his father laugh. The problem of supplying food
was a somber one to John Clemens; also, he was working on a
perpetual-motion machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time,
and, to the inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. Jane
Clemens was busy, too. Her sense of humor did not die, but with added
cares and years her temper as well as her features became sharper, and
it was just as well to be fairly out of range when she was busy with
her employments.
Little Sam’s companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than
himself: Orion, ten years his senior, followed by Pamela and Margaret
at intervals of two and three years, then by Benjamin, a kindly little
lad whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby
brother, three years his junior. But in addition to these associations,
there were the still more potent influences Of that day and section,
the intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily
companionship of the slaves. All the children of that time were fond of
the negroes and confided in them. They would, in fact, have been lost
without such protection and company.
It was Jennie, the house-girl, and Uncle Ned, a man of all work
—apparently acquired with the improved prospects—who were in real
charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. Wonderful
entertainment it was. That was a time of visions and dreams, small.
gossip and superstitions. Old tales were repeated over and over, with
adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. At evening
the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open
fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting
legends. Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of
this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror
and delight of its curdling thrill. The tales always began with “Once
’pon a time,” and one of them was the story of the “Golden Arm” which
the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider
audiences in many lands. Briefly it ran as follows:
“Once ’Pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a’
arm of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard;
and one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden
arm and tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him;
and she was his wife; and she says:
“W-h-a-r-r’s my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r’s my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r’s my
g-o-l-den arm?”
As Uncle Ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look
first one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands
drawn up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked
like claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking
forms before him. The tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if
waiting each time for a reply. The culmination came with a pounce on
one of the group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of:
“YOU’VE got it!’ and she tore him all to pieces!”
And the children would shout “Lordy!” and look furtively over their
shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but,
instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the
flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up
on another. Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to
follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods.
“Once ’pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road and
he come to a ha’nted house, and he heard de chains’a-rattlin’ and
a-rattlin’ and a-rattlin’, and a ball of fire come rollin’ up and got
under his stirrup, and it didn’t make no difference if his horse
galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his
stirrup till he got plum to de front do’, and his wife come out and
say: ‘My Gord, dat’s devil fire!’ and she had to work a witch spell to
drive it away.”
“How big was it, Uncle Ned?”
“Oh, ’bout as big as your head, and I ’spect it’s likely to come down
dis yere chimney ’most any time.”
Certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the
imagination of a delicate child. All the games and daily talk concerned
fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities. The
children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs,
all learned of their negro guardians.
But if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the
children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. The greatest
real dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. A
runaway slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated
worse when caught. Once the children saw one brought into Florida by
six men who took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the
floor and bound him with ropes. His groans were loud and frequent. Such
things made an impression that would last a lifetime.
Slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. Jennie
especially was often saucy and obstreperous. Jane Clemens, with more
strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for
insolence, whereupon Jennie snatched the whip from her hand. John
Clemens was sent for in haste. He came at once, tied Jennie’s wrists
together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the
shoulders with a cowhide. These were things all calculated to impress a
sensitive child.
In pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting
berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine,
picking the petals from daisies to the formula “Love me-love me not,”
always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their
small darky followers. Shoes were taken off the first of April. For a
time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon
disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. One of their dreads
was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was
liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. They
knew what lockjaw was—Uncle John Quarles’s black man, Dan, was subject
to it. Sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he
felt the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or
jole and greens, or the piece of ’possum he was eating, while his mouth
remained a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a
natural position by an exertion of muscular power that would have
well-nigh lifted an ox.
Uncle John Quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources of
never-ending delight. Perhaps the farm was just an ordinary Missouri
farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these
things were never apparent. There was a halo about anything that
belonged to Uncle John Quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious
kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. To visit at his house was
for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. When the
children came for eggs he would say:
“Your hens won’t lay, eh? Tell your maw to feed ’em parched corn and
drive ’em uphill,” and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to
his small hearers.
Also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting
and tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. He
would make the most fearful threats to his own children, for
disobedience, but never executed any of them. When they were out
fishing and returned late he would say:
“You—if I have to hunt you again after dark, I will make you smell like
a burnt horn!”
Nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children,
with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen—if it
ever did happen—that would result in giving a child that peculiar
savor. Altogether it was a curious early childhood that Little Sam
had—at least it seems so to us now. Doubtless it was commonplace enough
for that time and locality.
V
THE WAY OF FORTUNE
Perhaps John Quarles’s jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general
conduct did not altogether harmonize with John Clemens’s more taciturn
business methods. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of
dreams, Clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in
order. He had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and
confusion, which very likely were the chief features of John Quarles’s
storekeeping. At all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of
two or three years, and Clemens opened business for himself across the
street. He also practised law whenever there were cases, and was
elected justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of “Judge.”
He needed some one to assist in the store, and took in Orion, who was
by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth,
Orion—all his days a visionary—was a studious, pensive lad with no
taste for commerce. Then a partnership was formed with a man who
developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster
in the end. The modest tide of success which had come with John
Clemens’s establishment at Florida had begun to wane. Another boy,
Henry, born in July, 1838, added one more responsibility to his
burdens.
There still remained a promise of better things. There seemed at least
a good prospect that the scheme for making Salt River navigable was
likely to become operative. With even small boats (bateaux) running as
high as the lower branch of the South Fork, Florida would become an
emporium of trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village
would reap a harvest. An act of the Legislature was passed
incorporating the navigation company, with Judge Clemens as its
president. Congress was petitioned to aid this work of internal
improvement. So confident was the company of success that the hamlet
was thrown into a fever of excitement by the establishment of a
boatyard and, the actual construction of a bateau; but a Democratic
Congress turned its back on the proposed improvement. No boat bigger
than a skiff ever ascended Salt River, though there was a wild report,
evidently a hoax, that a party of picnickers had seen one night a
ghostly steamer, loaded and manned, puffing up the stream. An old
Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when he heard of it, said:
“I don’t doubt a word they say. In Scotland, it often happens that when
people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits
abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a
looking-glass. That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat.”
But John Quarles, who was present, laughed:
“If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were,” he
said. “They were the Democratic candidates at the last election. They
killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them. Their
ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat.”
It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and
traveled far, was the origin of the term “Going up Salt River,” as
applied to defeated political candidates.*
* The dictionaries give this phrase as probably traceable to a small,
difficult stream in Kentucky; but it seems more reasonable to believe
that it originated in Quarles’s witty comment.
No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River.
Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such
thought. Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and
easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and
dams. Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and
became mere scenery. Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the
Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida
nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day. Perhaps such
close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of
this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career
of the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain.
VI
A NEW HOME
The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the
Clemens family in Florida. Doubtless it hastened their departure. There
was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck,
rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring
about a judgment. Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their
good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. That same
day, when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school,
Margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her
flushed cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down.
She was never in her right mind again. The doctor was sent for and
diagnosed the case “bilious fever.” One evening, about nine o’clock,
Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when
the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in
from his bedroom, fast asleep. He came to the side of the trundle-bed
and pulled at the bedding near Margaret’s shoulder for some time before
he woke. Next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it
was known that she could not live. About a week later she died. She was
nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks,
black hair, and bright eyes. This was in August, 1839. It was Little
Sam’s first sight of death—the first break in the Clemens family: it
left a sad household. The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to have
seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the
funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery,
exactly as it happened.
Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was
without one great comforting thought—the future of the Tennessee land.
It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill.
“When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right,” was the
refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for him
that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days.
Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress.
When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest
ebb, it was offered at any price—at five cents an acre, sometimes. When
conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even
to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine
offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was
always refused after a little consideration.
“We will struggle along somehow, Jane,” he would say. “We will not
throw away the children’s fortune.”
There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land—Jane Clemens’s
favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal
optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always
had “millions in it”—everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily,
in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into
figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining
those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as “our
kindred,” casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the
“present earl.” Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he
created Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in
The Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. The words
“Tennessee land,” with their golden promise, became his earliest
remembered syllables. He grew to detest them in time, for they came to
mean mockery.
One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and
fifty dollars, and such was the moment’s need that even this was
considered. Then, of course, it was scornfully refused. In some
autobiographical chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said:
“If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have
been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the
Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations.”
What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in
the beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which, though
little more than a village, was on a river already navigable—a
steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade
already established—that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri—a point well
chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day.
He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.
He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder
overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was
ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason,
his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being
always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of
deliberate desertion.
“The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a
few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they
had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world
would have seen how I was treated and would have cried ‘Shame!’”
This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously
confused with another, in Mark Twain’s mind. In an autobiographical
chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to
Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his
absentminded family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen
then, but later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an
absent-minded family if the parents, and the sister and brothers
ranging up to fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little
Sam, age four, behind.*
* As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain’s memory played him
many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through his vivid
imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual
occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally
they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author’s purpose in
every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.
VII
THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL
Hannibal in 1839 was already a corporate community and had an
atmosphere of its own. It was a town with a distinct Southern flavor,
though rather more astir than the true Southern community of that
period; more Western in that it planned, though without excitement,
certain new enterprises and made a show, at least, of manufacturing. It
was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was
not wholly asleep—that is to say, dead—and it was tranquilly content.
Mark Twain remembered it as “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of
a summer morning, . . . the great Mississippi, the magnificent
Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along; . . . the dense forest
away on the other side.”
The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with
bluffs, with Holliday’s Hill on the north, Lover’s Leap on the south,
the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in
the way of setting.
The river, of course, was the great highway. Rafts drifted by;
steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside
world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away.
Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on
airs accordingly. It had society, too—all kinds—from the negroes and
the town drunkards (“General” Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben
Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and
tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats,
ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive
color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. These and their families
constituted the true aristocracy of the Southern town. Most of them had
pleasant homes—brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded
entrances, after the manner of all Southern architecture of that
period, which had an undoubted Greek root, because of certain
drawing-books, it is said, accessible to the builders of those days.
Most of them, also, had means —slaves and land which yielded an income
in addition to their professional earnings. They lived in such style as
was considered fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were
then obtainable.
It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family
belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the
comforts or the ostentation of his class. He settled his family and
belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street—the Pavey Hotel; his
merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a
new suit of clothes, as clerk. Possibly the clothes gave Orion a
renewed ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. Business did not
begin actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the
time. A little later he became a printer’s apprentice, in the office of
the Hannibal Journal, at his father’s suggestion.
Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. He was to be much
associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his
personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. He
was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater
or less degree were to go with him through life. Of a kindly, loving
disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but
always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard of
those who knew him best. His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the
whole, of a negative kind. Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency
to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits
of any sort. That was his chief misfortune. Full of whims and fancies,
unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and
influence. Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement,
only to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed
paragraph or bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. Such a
life is bound to be a succession of extremes—alternate periods of
supreme exaltation and despair. In his autobiographical chapters,
already mentioned, Orion sets down every impulse and emotion and
failure with that faithful humility which won him always the respect,
if not always the approval, of men.
Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it
keenly. A gentleman’s son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land,
he was entitled to a profession. To him it was punishment, and the
disgrace weighed upon him. Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin
had been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes
for his dinner. Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he
took only a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day
when he should electrify the world with his eloquence. He was surprised
to find how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he
learned his trade.
Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put
to school. They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby,
was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. Little Sam was the
least promising of the flock. He remained delicate, and developed
little beyond a tendency to pranks. He was a queer, fanciful,
uncommunicative child that detested indoors and would run away if not
watched—always in the direction of the river. He walked in his sleep,
too, and often the rest of the household got up in the middle of the
night to find him fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor
was summoned for him oftener than was good for the family purse—or for
him, perhaps, if we may credit the story of heavy dosings of those
stern allopathic days.
Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of
ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles—the black,
deadly kind—was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He
yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen
boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into
bed with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some
days later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam’s
bed to see him die. According to his own after-confession, this
gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching
scene. However, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in
search of fresh laurels.* He must have been a wearing child, and we may
believe that Jane Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not
always find him a comfort.
* In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of
this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to various
years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required. Without
doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very young.
“You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” she said to him
once, in her old age.
“I suppose you were afraid I wouldn’t live,” he suggested, in his
tranquil fashion.
She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty
years. “No; afraid you would,” she said. But that was only her joke,
for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like
mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of
her mother’s care.
It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John
Quarles’s farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that an
incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole
family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June
Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied
by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day’s
drive, leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday
morning. The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his
horse, and Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens,
his mind far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the
little boy, and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his
brother-in-law’s farm. Then he was confronted by Jane Clemens, who
demanded Little Sam.
“Why,” said the judge, aghast, “I never once thought of him after I
left him asleep.”
Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily
saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal. He arrived
in the early dusk. The child was safe enough, but he was crying with
loneliness and hunger. He had spent most of the day in the locked,
deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal ran
out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. He was fed and
comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer
and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and
lent a coloring to his later years.
VIII
THE FARM
We have already mentioned the delight of the Clemens children in Uncle
John Quarles’s farm. To Little Sam it was probably a life-saver. With
his small cousin, Tabitha,* just his own age (they called her Puss), he
wandered over that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new
delights everywhere. A slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she
was only six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was
just a playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. Sometimes,
indeed, it was necessary for her to threaten to tell “Miss Patsey” or
“Miss Jane,” when her little charges insisted on going farther or
staying later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own
personal safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the
farm was just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom.
* Tabitha Quarles, now Mrs. Greening, of Palmyra, Missouri, has
supplied most of the material for this chapter.
The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile
made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. In the corner of the yard
were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill
fell away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a
brook—a divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. Down in
the pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the
children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and
then took her turn and “balanced” herself so high that their one wish
was to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way. All the woods
were full of squirrels—gray squirrels and the red-fox species—and many
birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and
butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks;
there were blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the
orchard, and watermelons in the corn. They were not always ripe, those
watermelons, and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a
green one, he was seized with cramps so severe that most of the
household expected him to die forthwith.
Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned.
“Sammy will pull through,” she said; “he wasn’t born to die that way.”
It is the slender constitution that bears the strain. “Sammy” did pull
through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure.
There were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from
the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy
loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat.
This last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children
would dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was
driving would pretend not to see. Then in the evening when the black
woman came along, going after the cows, the children would race ahead
and set the cows running and jingling their bells—especially Little
Sam, for he was a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that
sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a
series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as
he lay rolling in the grass.
His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health,
and the encouragement of John Quarles’s good-natured, fun-loving
slaves.
The negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. In
one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children
visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a
thousand years old and to have talked with Moses. The negroes believed
this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in
the desert, coming out of Egypt. The bald spot on her head was caused
by fright at seeing Pharaoh drowned. She also knew how to avert spells
and ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. Uncle Dan’l
was a favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional
lockjaw gave him an unusual distinction. Long afterward he would become
Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his
gentle guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men.
Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle
John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. It
was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in)
connecting the two divisions. In the summer the table was set in the
middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served
in the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that
left only room for rows of plates around the edge. Fried chicken, roast
pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits,
partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens—the list is too long to be
served here. If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and
in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. His mother kept him
there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather
around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote of that
scene:
I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its
buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the
trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel
whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the
mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited,
and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the
vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose ends a sugary
sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate
it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy
dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner
and my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and
carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled
with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a
leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background
twilight; splint-bottom chairs here and there—some with rockers; a
cradle —out of service, but waiting with confidence.
One is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these
vivid memories—the thousand minute impressions which the child’s
sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal
everywhere in his work in the years to come. For him it was education
of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from
books.
IX
SCHOOL-DAYS
Nevertheless, on his return to Hannibal, it was decided that Little Sam
was now ready to go to school. He was about five years old, and the
months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very
robust. His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the
other children put together.
“He drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house,” she used
to say; “and when he is out of it I am expecting every minute that some
one will bring him home half dead.”
He did, in fact, achieve the first of his “nine narrow escapes from
drowning” about this time, and was pulled out of the river one
afternoon and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. When
with mullein tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she
said: “I guess there wasn’t much danger. People born to be hanged are
safe in water.”
She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands
for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. Perhaps this is a
good place to say that Jane Clemens was the original of Tom Sawyer’s
“Aunt Polly,” and her portrait as presented in that book is considered
perfect. Kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older
than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes
severe, she was regarded as a “character” by her friends, and beloved
by them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know.
Her sense of pity was abnormal. She refused to kill even flies, and
punished the cat for catching mice. She, would drown the young kittens,
when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. On coming to
Hannibal, she joined the Presbyterian Church, and her religion was of
that clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions
hell and Satan, though she had been known to express pity for the
latter for being obliged to surround himself with such poor society.
Her children she directed with considerable firmness, and all were
tractable and growing in grace except Little Sam. Even baby Henry at
two was lisping the prayers that Sam would let go by default unless
carefully guarded. His sister Pamela, who was eight years older and
always loved him dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises,
and in her gentle care earned immortality as the Cousin Mary of Tom
Sawyer. He would say his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by
sister Pamela, but he much preferred to sit up in bed and tell
astonishing tales of the day’s adventure—tales which made prayer seem a
futile corrective and caused his listeners to wonder why the lightning
was restrained so long. They did not know they were glimpsing the first
outcroppings of a genius that would one day amaze and entertain the
nations. Neighbors hearing of these things (also certain of his
narrations) remonstrated with Mrs. Clemens.
“You don’t believe anything that child says, I hope.”
“Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest
is pure gold.” At another time she said: “Sammy is a well of truth, but
you can’t bring it all up in one bucket.”
This, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat
later.
A certain Miss E. Horr was selected to receive the payment for taking
charge of Little Sam during several hours each day, directing him
mentally and morally in the mean time. Her school was then in a log
house on Main Street (later it was removed to Third Street), and was of
the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in
advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to
long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of
spelling. Long division and the third reader completed the curriculum
in that school. Pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went
to a Mr. Cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is
now the Public Square.
Miss Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened
her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the Bible, with
explanations, and the rules of conduct. Then the A B C class was
called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no
preparation.
The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam. He
calculated how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the
danger-line and still avoid disaster. He made a miscalculation during
the forenoon and received warning; a second offense would mean
punishment. He did not mean to be caught the second time, but he had
not learned Miss Horr yet, and was presently startled by being
commanded to go out and bring a stick for his own correction.
This was certainly disturbing. It was sudden, and then he did not know
much about the selection of sticks. Jane Clemens had usually used her
hand. It required a second command to get him headed in the right
direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. He had the
forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was difficult.
Everything looked too big and competent. Even the smallest switch had a
wiry, discouraging look. Across the way was a cooper-shop with a good
many shavings outside.
One had blown across and lay just in front of him. It was an
inspiration. He picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room,
meekly handed it to Miss Herr.
Perhaps Miss Horr’s sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline
must be maintained.
“Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” she said (he had never heard it all strung
together in that ominous way), “I am ashamed of you! Jimmy Dunlap, go
and bring a switch for Sammy.” And Jimmy Dunlap went, and the switch
was of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent
distaste for school. He informed his mother when he went home at noon
that he did not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great
man; that he preferred to be a pirate or an Indian and scalp or drown
such people as Miss Horr. Down in her heart his mother was sorry for
him, but what she said was that she was glad there was somebody at last
who could take him in hand.
He returned to school, but he never learned to like it. Each morning he
went with reluctance and remained with loathing—the loathing which he
always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the
smallest curtailment of liberty. A School was ruled with a rod in those
days, a busy and efficient rod, as the Scripture recommended. Of the
smaller boys Little Sam’s back was sore as often as the next, and he
dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend
with his band and capture Miss Horr and probably drag her by the hair,
as he had seen Indians and pirates do in the pictures. When the days of
early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine
lighting the soft green of Holliday’s Hill, with the purple distance
beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up
with a Webster’s spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human
nature could bear. Among the records preserved from that far-off day
there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship
is inscribed: