MISS PAMELA CLEMENS

Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable

deportment and faithful application to her various studies.

E. Horr, _Teacher_.

If any such testimonial was ever awarded to Little Sam, diligent search

has failed to reveal it. If he won the love of his teacher and

playmates it was probably for other reasons.

Yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was

soon regarded as a good speller for his years. His spelling came as a

natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later.

It has already been mentioned that Miss Horr opened her school with

prayer and Scriptural readings. Little Sam did not especially delight

in these things, but he respected them. Not to do so was dangerous.

Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of

sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that. He also

respected Miss Horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read

the text “Ask and ye shall receive” and assured them that whoever

prayed for a thing earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed

it. A small schoolmate, the baker’s daughter, brought gingerbread to

school every morning, and Little Sam was just “honing” for some of it.

He wanted a piece of that baker’s gingerbread more than anything else

in the world, and he decided to pray for it.

The little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had

kept the gingerbread out of sight. Now, however, when he finished his

prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front

of him. Perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look

in his eyes. Possibly she had heard his petition; at all events his

prayer bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved

Holliday’s Hill. He decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when

he tried the gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result.

Grieved, but still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no

gingerbread; and when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew

despairing and silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt. His mother

said:

“What’s the matter, Sammy; are you sick?”

“No,” he said, “but I don’t believe in saying prayers any more, and I’m

never going to do it again.”

“Why, Sammy, what in the world has happened?” she asked, anxiously.

Then he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a

serious thing in that day openly to repudiate faith. Jane Clemens

gathered him to her heart and comforted him.

“I’ll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that,” she said,

“and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to Uncle John’s

farm.”

And so passed and ended Little Sam’s first school-days.

X

EARLY VICISSITUDE AND SORROW

Prosperity came laggingly enough to the Clemens household. The year

1840 brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return;

law practice was not much more remunerative. Judge Clemens ran for the

office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither

large nor frequent. By the end of the year it became necessary to part

with Jennie, the slave-girl—a grief to all of them, for they were fond

of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as “her

family.” She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good

price. A Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same

time to another minister who took it to his home farther South. As the

steamboat moved away from the landing the child’s mother stood at the

water’s edge, shrieking her anguish. We are prone to consider these

things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a

century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from

its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing

dam. One could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or

convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment. Mark Twain

once said of his mother:

“Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not

conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted

usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had

heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her

experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the

belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of

the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily

and nightly thankful for.”

Yet Jane Clemens must have had qualms at times—vague, unassembled

doubts that troubled her spirit. After Jennie was gone a little black

chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east

shore of Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, far

from family and friends.

He was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy.

All day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise

became monotonous, maddening. One day Little Sam said:

“Ma—[that was the Southern term]—make Sandy stop singing all the time.

It’s awful.”

Tears suddenly came into his mother’s eyes.

“Poor thing! He is sold away from his home. When he sings it shows

maybe he is not remembering. When he’s still I am afraid he is

thinking, and I can’t bear it.”

Yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was

held in abhorrence. An abolitionist was something to despise, to stone

out of the community. The children held the name in horror, as

belonging to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps,

and a tail.

The money received for the sale of Jennie made judge Clemens easier for

a time. Business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided

through another year during which he seems to have made payments on an

expensive piece of real estate on Hill and Main streets. This property,

acquired in November, 1839, meant the payment of some seven thousand

dollars, and was a credit purchase, beyond doubt. It was well rented,

but the tenants did not always pay; and presently a crisis came—a

descent of creditors —and John: Clemens at forty-four found himself

without business and without means. He offered everything—his cow, his

household furniture, even his forks and spoons—to his creditors, who

protested that he must not strip himself. They assured him that they

admired his integrity so much they would aid him to resume business;

but when he went to St. Louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly

met, and the venture came to nothing.

He now made a trip to Tennessee in the hope of collecting some old

debts and to raise money on the Tennessee land. He took along a negro

man named Charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping

to make something through his disposal in a better market. The trip was

another failure. The man who owed him a considerable sum of money was

solvent, but pleaded hard times:

It seems so very hard upon him—[John Clemens wrote home]—to pay such a

sum that I could not have the conscience to hold him to it. . . I still

have Charlie. The highest price I had offered for him in New Orleans

was $50, in Vicksburg $40. After performing the journey to Tennessee, I

expect to sell him for whatever he will bring.

I do not know what I can commence for a business in the spring. My

brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and I can’t relieve

myself of it. The future, taking its completion from the state of my

health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over-shadowed

with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose. I want bodily

exercise—some constant and active employment, in the first place; and,

in the next place, I want to be paid for it, if possible.

This letter is dated January 7, 1842. He returned without any financial

success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on

the levee. The proprietor found some fault one day, and Judge Clemens

walked out of the premises. On his way home he stopped in a general

store, kept by a man named Selms, to make some purchases. When he asked

that these be placed on account, Selms hesitated. Judge Clemens laid

down a five-dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the

world, took the goods, and never entered the place again.

When Jane Clemens reproached him for having made the trip to Tennessee,

at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only

replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best.

“I am not able to dig in the streets,” he added, and Orion, who records

this, adds:

“I can see yet the hopeless expression of his face.”

During a former period of depression, such as this, death had come into

the Clemens home. It came again now. Little Benjamin, a sensitive,

amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, May 12,

1842. He was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow. Little

Sam long remembered the picture of his parents’ grief; and Orion

recalls that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown.

Judge Clemens went back to his law and judicial practice. Mrs. Clemens

decided to take a few boarders. Orion, by this time seventeen and a

very good journeyman printer, obtained a place in St. Louis to aid in

the family support.

The tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle

stage of improvement set in. Times grew better in Hannibal after those

first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent.

Within another two years judge Clemens appears to have been in fairly

hopeful circumstances again—able at least to invest some money in

silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for Pamela, and to

build a modest house on the Hill Street property, which a rich St.

Louis cousin, James Clemens, had preserved for him. It was the house

which is known today as the “Mark Twain Home.”* Near it, toward the

corner of Main Street, was his office, and here he dispensed law and

justice in a manner which, if it did not bring him affluence, at least

won for him the respect of the entire community. One example will

serve:

* This house, in 1911, was bought by Mr. and Mrs. George A. Mahan, and

presented to Hannibal for a memorial museum.

Next to his office was a stone-cutter’s shop. One day the proprietor,

Dave Atkinson, got into a muss with one “Fighting” MacDonald, and there

was a tremendous racket. Judge Clemens ran out and found the men down,

punishing each other on the pavement.

“I command the peace!” he shouted, as he came up to them.

No one paid the least attention.

“I command the peace!” he shouted again, still louder, but with no

result.

A stone-cutter’s mallet lay there, handy. Judge Clemens seized it and,

leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, MacDonald, a smart

blow on the head.

“I command the peace!” he said, for the third time, and struck a

considerably smarter blow.

That settled it. The second blow was of the sort that made MacDonald

roll over, and peace ensued. Judge Clemens haled both men into his

court, fined them, and collected his fee. Such enterprise in the cause

of justice deserved prompt reward.

XI

DAYS OF EDUCATION

The Clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in

Hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period

of occupation of each can no longer be established. Mark Twain once

said:

“In 1843 my father caught me in a lie. It is not this fact that gives

me the date, but the house we lived in. We were there only a year.”

We may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his

memory of the place, for his father seldom punished him. When he did,

it was a thorough and satisfactory performance.

It was about the period of moving into the new house (1844) that the

Tom Sawyer days—that is to say, the boyhood of Samuel Clemens—may be

said to have begun. Up to that time he was just Little Sam, a

child—wild, and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child—a

delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to

bed. Now, at nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to

look out for himself, as boys will, in a community like that,

especially where the family is rather larger than the income and there

is still a younger child to claim a mother’s protecting care. So “Sam,”

as they now called him, “grew up” at nine, and was full of knowledge

for his years. Not that he was old in spirit or manner—he was never

that, even to his death—but he had learned a great number of things,

mostly of a kind not acquired at school.

They were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a

kind startling to a boy, even terrifying. Once Little Sam—he was still

Little Sam, then—saw an old man shot down on the main street, at

noonday. He saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on

his breast an open family Bible which looked as heavy as an anvil. He

though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old

dying man would not breathe so heavily. He saw a young emigrant stabbed

with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of

life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle,

one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver

which failed to go off. Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed

to raid the “Welshman’s” house one dark threatening night—he saw that,

too. A widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the

whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. Sam Clemens

and a boon companion, John Briggs, went up there to look and listen.

The man was at the gate, and the women were invisible in the shadow of

the dark porch. The boys heard the elder woman’s voice warning the man

that she had a loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed

where he was. He replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she

would count ten-that if he remained a second longer she would fire. She

began slowly and counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering. At

six he grew silent, but he did not go. She counted on:

seven—eight—nine—The boys watching from the dark roadside felt their

hearts stop. There was a long pause, then the final count, followed a

second later by a gush of flame. The man dropped, his breast riddled.

At the same instant the thunderstorm that had been gathering broke

loose. The boys fled wildly, believing that Satan himself had arrived

to claim the lost soul.

Many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. And

there were events incident to slavery. He saw a slave struck down and

killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. He saw an

abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not

a Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. He

did not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave

auction, but he added:

“I am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace

spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. I do vividly remember

seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on

the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market. They had the

saddest faces I ever saw.”

It is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge

amid such happenings as these. They were wild, disturbing things. They

got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of

the night. He did not then regard them as an education. In some vague

way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him

a taste for a better life. He felt that it was his own conscience that

made these things torture him. That was his mother’s idea, and he had a

high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. Among other

things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican—a

common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a

heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. Cautious

citizens got out of her way, but Jane Clemens opened her door wide to

the refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her

arms across it, barring the way. The man swore and threatened her with

the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. She stood

there and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up

the rope and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. Any one who could do

that must have a perfect conscience, Sam thought. In the fearsome

darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was

coming, and vow to begin a better life in the morning. He detested

Sunday-school as much as day-school, and once Orion, who was moral and

religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the

thunder got louder Sam decided that he loved Sunday-school and would go

the next Sunday without being invited.

Fortunately there were pleasanter things than these. There were picnics

sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions. Once there was a great

Fourth-of-July celebration at which it was said a real Revolutionary

soldier was to be present. Some one had discovered him living alone

seven or eight miles in the country. But this feature proved a

disappointment; for when the day came and he was triumphantly brought

in he turned out to be a Hessian, and was allowed to walk home.

The hills and woods around Hannibal where, with his playmates, he

roamed almost at will were never disappointing. There was the cave with

its marvels; there was Bear Creek, where, after repeated accidents, he

had learned to swim. It had cost him heavily to learn to swim. He had

seen two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been

dragged ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time

by a slaveman—Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel. In the end he had

conquered; he could swim better than any boy in town of his age.

It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm

was permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world.

The river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous

steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to

the sea! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out

on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong

enough to lift an oar out of the water. He learned to know all its

moods and phases. He felt its kinship. In some occult way he may have

known it as his prototype—that resistless tide of life with its

ever-changing sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its

gorgeous sunset hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea.

His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. To be

even the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would

be enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was

to be a god.

“You can hardly imagine what it meant,” he reflected once, “to a boy in

those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and

down, and never to take a trip on them.”

He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no

longer. One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal,

he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.

Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung

into midstream; he was really going at last. He crept from beneath the

boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. Then

it began to rain—a terrific downpour. He crept back under the boat, but

his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. So he was taken

down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. It was the town of

Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who took him home.

Jane Clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand;

which he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual

way. These were all educational things; then there was always the farm,

where entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings,

with a colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his

older boy cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for

squirrels and partridges by day, for coons and possums by night.

Sometimes the little boy had followed the hunters all night long and

returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh,

hungry, and triumphant just in time for breakfast.

So it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer “Little Sam,” but Sam

Clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men

and things and a variety of accomplishments. He had even learned to

smoke—a little—out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing,

though that was a failure. He had been stung to this effort by a big

girl at a school which, with his cousin Puss, he sometimes briefly

attended.

“Do you use terbacker?” the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it.

“No,” he said, abashed at the confession.

“Haw!” she cried to the other scholars; “here’s a boy that can’t chaw

terbacker.”

Degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made

him very ill; and he did not try again.

He had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and

used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant. He had an

impression that she would “skin him alive” if she heard him swear. His

education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom.

He was not a particularly attractive lad. He was not tall for his

years, and his head was somewhat too large for his body. He had a

“great ruck” of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it

from curling; keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features. Still, he

had a fair, delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or

tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured

way of speaking, made him a favorite with his companions. He did not

speak much, and his mental attainments were not highly regarded; but,

for some reason, whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing

stopped whatever he was doing and listened. Perhaps it would be a plan

for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was

just a commonplace remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing.

Whatever it was, they considered it worth while. His mother always

referred to his slow fashion of speaking as “Sammy’s long talk.” Her

own speech was still more deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it.

Henry—a much handsomer lad and regarded as far more promising—did not

have it. He was a lovable, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous

Sam took delight in teasing. For this and other reasons the latter’s

punishments were frequent enough, perhaps not always deserved.

Sometimes he charged his mother with partiality. He would say:

“Yes, no matter what it is, I am always the one to get punished”; and

his mother would answer:

“Well, Sam, if you didn’t deserve it for that, you did for something

else.”

Henry Clemens became the Sid of Tom Sawyer, though Henry was in every

way a finer character than Sid. His brother Sam always loved him, and

fought for him oftener than with him.

With the death of Benjamin Clemens, Henry and Sam were naturally drawn

much closer together, though Sam could seldom resist the temptation of

tormenting Henry. A schoolmate, George Butler (he was a nephew of

General Butler and afterward fought bravely in the Civil War), had a

little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all.

Mrs. Clemens finally made Sam and Henry suits of blue cotton velvet,

and the next Sunday, after various services were over, the two

sauntered about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll

in the woods. They walked along properly enough, at first, then just

ahead Sam spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping

impulse took a running leap over it. There were splinters on the stump

where the tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly. Henry

wanted to match the performance, but was afraid to try, so Sam dared

him. He kept daring him until Henry was goaded to the attempt. He

cleared the stump, but the highest splinters caught the slack of his

little blue trousers, and the cloth gave way. He escaped injury, but

the precious trousers were damaged almost beyond repair. Sam, with a

boy’s heartlessness, was fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at

Henry’s appearance.

“Cotton-tail rabbit!” he shouted. “Cotton-tail rabbit!” while Henry,

weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road. Let us

hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the

proper locality.

These two brothers were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as

a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile

and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him

to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a

time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his

hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry

would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was

removed and the room swept clean.

The home incidents in ‘Tom Sawyer’, most of them, really happened. Sam

Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored

thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming;

he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he

did give Pain-killer to Peter, the cat. There was a cholera scare that

year, and Pain-killer was regarded as a preventive. Sam had been

ordered to take it liberally, and perhaps thought Peter too should be

safeguarded. As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner

described in that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods

adapted themselves to the conditions. In the introduction to Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the

reality of its characters. “Huck Finn was drawn from life,” he tells

us. “Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of

the characteristics of three boys whom I knew.”

The three boys were—himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree John

Briggs and Will Bowen. John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper

in that book. As for Huck Finn, his original was Tom Blankenship,

neither elaborated nor qualified.

There were several of the Blankenships: there was old Ben, the father,

who had succeeded “General” Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the

eldest son—a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom—that is to

say, Huck—who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer: a ruin of

rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart

and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of

conduct to any living soul. He could came and go as he chose; he never

had to work or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that

the other boys longed to do and were forbidden. He represented to them

the very embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important

matters, such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs

and spells and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as

a companion. The fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly

added charm.

The Blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and

lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later

moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on

Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle

even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still

standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which

must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben

Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off

as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom—a fame founded on

irresponsibility and inconsequence. Orion Clemens, who was concerned

with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the

Blankenships spiritually. Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to

his heart. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and

Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back

single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the

group of boon companions which, besides Tom, included John Briggs, the

Bowen boys, Will Pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits. They

were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only

mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of

the comforts and the rights of others.

XII

TOM SAWYER’S BAND

They ranged from Holliday’s Hill on the north to the Cave on the south,

and over the fields and through all the woods about. They navigated the

river from Turtle Island to Glasscock’s Island (now Pearl, or Tom

Sawyer’s Island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the

Illinois shore. They could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks;

they could handle a boat as if born in one. No orchard or melon patch

was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that

they did not sooner or later elude it. They borrowed boats when their

owners were not present. Once when they found this too much trouble,

they decided to own a boat, and one Sunday gave a certain borrowed

craft a coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it

for a season up Bear Creek. They borrowed the paint also, and the

brush, though they carefully returned these the same evening about

nightfall, so the painter could have them Monday morning. Tom

Blankenship rigged up a sail for the new craft, and Sam Clemens named

it Cecilia, after which they didn’t need to borrow boats any more,

though the owner of it did; and he sometimes used to observe as he saw

it pass that, if it had been any other color but red, he would have

sworn it was his.

Some of their expeditions were innocent enough. They often cruised up

to Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day

feasting. You could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up

there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish. Fishing

and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for

adventure. Where the railroad-bridge now ends on the Missouri side was

their favorite swimming-hole—that and along Bear Creek, a secluded

limpid water with special interests of its own. Sometimes at evening

they swam across to Glasscock’s Island—the rendezvous of Tom Sawyer’s

“Black Avengers” and the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim; then,

when they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for

an hour or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a

mile, breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without

exhaustion or fear. They could swim all day, likely enough, those

graceless young scamps. Once—though this was considerably later, when

he was sixteen —Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, and then

turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two

miles, as he had to go. He was seized with a cramp on the return trip.

His legs became useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining

distance with his arms. It was a hardy life they led, and it is not

recorded that they ever did any serious damage, though they narrowly

missed it sometimes.

One of their Sunday pastimes was to climb Holliday’s Hill and roll down

big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church.

Holliday’s Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go

plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly

swiftness of a twelve-inch shell. The boys would get a stone poised,

then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the

distance, would give it a start. Dropping down behind the bushes, they

would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great

missile shot across the road a few yards before them. This was Homeric

sport, but they carried it too far. Stones that had a habit of getting

loose so numerously on Sundays and so rarely on other days invited

suspicion, and the “Patterollers” (river patrol—a kind of police of

those days) were put on the watch. So the boys found other diversions

until the Patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a

grand coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the

stone-rolling line.

A rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good

position to go down hill, once, started. They decided it would be a

glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred

yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded

church-goer. Quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left

their picks and shovels over Sundays. The boys borrowed these, and went

to work to undermine the big stone. It was a heavier job than they had

counted on, but they worked faithfully, Sunday after Sunday. If their

parents had wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they

were being killed.

Finally one Sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and

started down. They were not quite ready for it. Nobody was coming but

an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted. It was not

quite wasted, however. They had planned for a thrilling result; and

there was thrill enough while it lasted. In the first place, the stone

nearly caught Will Bowen when it started. John Briggs had just that

moment quit digging and handed Will the pick. Will was about to step

into the excavation when Sam Clemens, who was already there, leaped out

with a yell:

“Look out, boys, she’s coming!”

She came. The huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering a

wild momentum, it went bounding into the air. About half-way down the

hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off. This

turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the

noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to

whip up his horse. It was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the

road. The boys watched it with growing interest. It made longer leaps

with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would

fly. They were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the

cooper-shop. The shop was empty, it being Sunday, but the rest of the

catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results. They wanted

to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. It was

making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get

directly in its path. They stood holding their breath, their mouths

open. Then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder

struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound

sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt

beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking it.

Half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty

years; then it was blasted up for milling purposes. It was the last

rock the boys ever rolled down. They began to suspect that the sport

was not altogether safe.

Sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those

days. On one occasion of this sort, Tom Blankenship had the skin of a

coon he had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd.

At Selms’s store on Wild Cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents,

but that was not enough. They arranged a plan which would make it pay a

good deal more than that. Selms’s window was open, it being

summer-time, and his pile of pelts was pretty handy. Huck—that is to

say, Tom—went in the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to

Selms, who tossed it back on the pile. Tom came back with the money and

after a reasonable period went around to the open window, crawled in,

got the coonskin, and sold it to Selms again. He did this several times

that afternoon; then John Pierce, Selms’s clerk, said:

“Look here, Selms, there is something wrong about this. That boy has

been selling us coonskins all the afternoon.”

Selms went to his pile of pelts. There were several sheepskins and some

cowhides, but only one coonskin—the one he had that moment bought.

Selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke.

Perhaps it is not adding to Mark Twain’s reputation to say that the boy

Sam Clemens—a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this

time—was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would

be less than historic. If the band had a leader, it was he. They were

always ready to listen to him—they would even stop fishing to do that

—and to follow his projects. They looked to him for ideas and

organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe.

When they played “Bandit” or “Pirate” or “Indian,” Sam Clemens was

always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was

no less distinguished. Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and

trappings of leadership. When the Christian Sons of Temperance came

along with a regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the

privilege of inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into

his eyes, and he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and

swearing (which he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor

(though he had never tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed

and pure in heart for a full month—a month of splendid leadership and

servitude. Then even the red sash could not hold him in bondage. He

looked up Tom Blankenship and said:

“Say, Tom, I’m blamed tired of this! Let’s go somewhere and smoke!”

Which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a

precious thing.

Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens’s

boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. It seems

almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have

looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet,

venerable Oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown.

He could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His

ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is

true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one

of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting

in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those

days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a

pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active,

where his word—his nod, even—constituted sufficient law. The river kept

the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background for

those other things.

The cave was an enduring and substantial joy. It was a real cave, not

merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted

chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth’s black

silences, even below the river, some said. For Sam Clemens the cave had

a fascination that never faded. Other localities and diversions might

pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for

the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door. With

its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its

remote hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw

band, it contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long

for. In Tom Sawyer Indian Joe dies in the cave. He did not die there in

real life, but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they

found him. He was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did

die there came up a thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home

and in bed was certain that Satan had come in person for the

half-breed’s wicked soul. He covered his head and said his prayers

industriously, in the fear that the evil one might conclude to save

another trip by taking him along, too.

The treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact.

There was a tradition concerning some French trappers who long before

had established a trading-post two miles above Hannibal, on what is

called the “bay.” It is said that, while one of these trappers was out

hunting, Indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others. The

hunter on returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the

Indians had failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest. He

left it there, swam across to Illinois, and made his way to St. Louis,

where he told of the massacre and the burial of the chest of gold. Then

he started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and

died. Later some men came up from St. Louis looking for the chest. They

did not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good

many people tried to find the gold.

Tom Blankenship one morning came to Sam Clemens and John Briggs and

said he was going to dig up the treasure. He said he had dreamed just

where it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would

divide up. The boys had great faith in dreams, especially Tom’s dreams.

Tom’s unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes. The

dreams of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something. They

followed Tom to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed

them where to dig. Then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and

gave orders.

They dug nearly all day. Now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe

to wonder a little why Tom didn’t dig some himself; but, of course, he

had done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share.

They did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning

they took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the

ground until they struck something hard. Then they would dig down to

see what it was, but it never turned out to be money. That night the

boys declared they would not dig any more. But Tom had another dream.

He dreamed the gold was exactly under the little papaw-tree. This

sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. It

was hot weather too, August, and that night they were nearly dead. Even

Tom gave it up, then. He said there was something about the way they

dug, but he never offered to do any digging himself.

This differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it

gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin

original of Huckleberry Finn.* Tom Blankenship’s brother, Ben, was also

drawn upon for that creation, at least so far as one important phase of

Huck’s character is concerned. He was considerably older, as well as

more disreputable, than Tom. He was inclined to torment the boys by

tying knots in their clothes when they went swimming, or by throwing

mud at them when they wanted to come out, and they had no deep love for

him. But somewhere in Ben Blankenship there was a fine generous strain

of humanity that provided Mark Twain with that immortal episode in the

story of Huck Finn—in sheltering the Nigger Jim.

* Much of the detail in this chapter was furnished to the writer by

John Briggs shortly before his death in 1907.

This is the real story:

A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the river

into Illinois. Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and

one day found him. It was considered a most worthy act in those days to

return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. Besides,

there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged

outcast Ben Blankenship. That money and the honor he could acquire must

have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human

sympathy. Instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, Ben kept

the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. The negro would fish

and Ben would carry him scraps of other food. Then, by and by, it

leaked out. Some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and

chased him to what was called “Bird Slough.” There trying to cross a

drift he was drowned.

In the book, the author makes Huck’s struggle a psychological one

between conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other.

With Ben Blankenship the struggle—if there was a struggle—was probably

between sympathy and cupidity. He would care very little for conscience

and still less for law. His sympathy with the runaway, however, would

be large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the

lure of that reward.

There was a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the

drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys

went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the

negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length

out of the water. He had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened

drift had released him. The boys did not stop to investigate. They

thought he was after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until

they reached human habitation.

How many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early

days! In ‘The Innocents Abroad’ Mark Twain tells of the murdered man he

saw one night in his father’s office. The man’s name was McFarlane. He

had been stabbed that day in the old Hudson-McFarlane feud and carried

in there to die. Sam Clemens and John Briggs had run away from school

and had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair.

Sam decided that his father’s office was safer for him than to face his

mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting. He tells us how he lay on

the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself into

the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window

approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly

stabbed breast.

“I went out of there,” he says. “I do not say that I went away in any

sort of a hurry, but I simply went; that is sufficient. I went out of

the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the

sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so I took

it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.”

He was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy

reached that age. Certainly these were disturbing, haunting things.

Then there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom

the boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco. Sam Clemens

spent some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of Lucifer

matches—a brand new invention then, scarce and high. The tramp started

a fire with the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it.

For weeks the boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought

that if he had not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not

have happened. Remorse was always Samuel Clemens’s surest punishment.

To his last days on earth he never outgrew its pangs.

What a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years! It

is not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of Sam Clemens and his

scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad

doings. They were an unpromising lot. Ministers and other sober-minded

citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and

considered them hardly worth praying for. They must have proven a

disappointing lot to those prophets. The Bowen boys became fine

river-pilots; Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank

director; John Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected

farmer; even Huck Finn—that is to say, Tom Blankenship—is reputed to

have ranked as an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a Western

town. But in those days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with

little respect for order and even less for ordinance.

XIII

THE GENTLER SIDE

His associations were not all of that lawless breed. At his school (he

had sampled several places of learning, and was now at Mr. Cross’s on

the Square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not

intrinsically better playmates. There was George Robards, the Latin

scholar, and John, his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last

with his father into the sunset, to California, his golden curls flying

in the wind. And there was Jimmy McDaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose

company was worth while, because his father was a confectioner, and he

used to bring candy and cake to school. Also there was Buck Brown, a

rival speller, and John Meredith, the doctor’s son, and John Garth, who

was one day to marry little Helen Kercheval, and in the end would be

remembered and honored with a beautiful memorial building not far from

the site of the old school.

Furthermore, there were a good many girls. Tom Sawyer had an

impressionable heart, and Sam Clemens no less so. There was Bettie

Ormsley, and Artemisia Briggs, and Jennie Brady; also Mary Miller, who

was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart.

“I believe I was as miserable as a grown man could be,” he said once,

remembering.

Tom Sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions

at such times were the emotions of Sam Clemens, say at the age of ten.

But, as Tom Sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he. They were

one and the same. Becky Thatcher in the book was Laura Hawkins in

reality. The acquaintance of these two had begun when the Hawkins

family moved into the Virginia house on the corner of Hill and Main

streets.* The Clemens family was then in the new home across the way,

and the children were soon acquainted. The boy could be tender and

kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the other sex. They

visited back and forth, especially around the new house, where there

were nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses. So they played

“keeping house,” and if they did not always agree well, since the

beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed, even in

Arcady. Once when they were building a house—and there may have been

some difference of opinion as to its architecture—the boy happened to

let a brick fall on the little girl’s finger. If there had been any

disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune. He tried to

comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered

most of the two, no doubt. So, you see, he was just a little boy, after

all, even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the “Black

Avengers of the Spanish Main.”

* The Hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of

that name in The Gilded Age. Judge Hawkins of The Gilded Age, as

already noted, was John Clemens. Mark Twain used the name Hawkins, also

the name of his boyhood sweetheart, Laura, merely for old times’ sake,

and because in portraying the childhood of Laura Hawkins he had a

picture of the real Laura in his mind.

He was always a tender-hearted lad. He would never abuse an animal,

unless, as in the Pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran

away with him. He had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when

he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket. When

he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table. His sympathy

included inanimate things as well. He loved flowers—not as the embryo

botanist or gardener, but as a personal friend. He pitied the dead leaf

and the murmuring dried weed of November because their brief lives were

ended, and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with

another spring. His heart went out to them; to the river and the sky,

the sunlit meadow and the drifted hill. That his observation of all

nature was minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but

it was never the observation of a young naturalist it was the

subconscious observation of sympathetic love.

We are wandering away from his school-days. They were brief enough and

came rapidly to an end. They will not hold us long. Undoubtedly Tom

Sawyer’s distaste for school and his excuses for staying at

home—usually some pretended illness—have ample foundation in the

boyhood of Sam Clemens. His mother punished him and pleaded with him,

alternately. He detested school as he detested nothing else on earth,

even going to church. “Church ain’t worth shucks,” said Tom Sawyer, but

it was better than school.

As already noted, the school of Mr. Cross stood in or near what is now

the Square in Hannibal. The Square was only a grove then, grown up with

plum, hazel, and vine—a rare place for children. At recess and the noon

hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in

grape-vine swings. There was a spelling-bee every Friday afternoon, for

Sam the only endurable event of the school exercises. He could hold the

floor at spelling longer than Buck Brown. This was spectacular and

showy; it invited compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name must have

been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well. One day Sam Clemens

wrote on his slate:

Cross by name and cross by nature—

Cross jumped over an Irish potato.

He showed this to John Briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius. He

urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet’s

ambition did not go so far.

“Oh, pshaw!” said John. “I wouldn’t be afraid to do it.

“I dare you to do it,” said Sam.

John Briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when Mr. Cross was at home

at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet. When the teacher

returned and “books” were called he looked steadily at John Briggs. He

had recognized the penmanship.

“Did you do that?” he asked, ominously.

It was a time for truth.

“Yes, sir,” said John.

“Come here!” And John came, and paid for his exploitation of genius

heavily. Sam Clemens expected that the next call would be for “author,”

but for some reason the investigation ended there. It was unusual for

him to escape. His back generally kept fairly warm from one “frailing”

to the next.

His rewards were not all of a punitive nature. There were two medals in

the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability. They were

awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck

conspicuously, and were envied accordingly. John Robards—he of the

golden curls—wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while

Sam Clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling. Sometimes they

traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this

practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the

week. Once Sam Clemens lost the medal by leaving the first “r” out of

February. He could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but Laura

Hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant

boy.

The picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty

years later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a

tender-hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and

longing only for freedom. It was a boon which would come to him sooner

even than he had dreamed.

XIV

THE PASSING OF JOHN CLEMENS

Judge Clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune

by devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method

of achieving disaster. He endorsed a large note, for a man of good

repute, and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property,

everything vanished again. The St. Louis cousin took over the home and

agreed to let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but

after an attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and

Pamela’s piano —all that had been saved from the wreck—they moved

across the street into a portion of the Virginia house, then occupied

by a Dr. Grant. The Grants proposed that the Clemens family move over

and board them, a welcome arrangement enough at this time.

Judge Clemens had still a hope left. The clerkship of the Surrogate

Court was soon to be filled by election. It was an important

remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate for

the position. His disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his

nomination and election were considered sure. He took no chances; he

made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through

rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to

overcome. He was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he

could hold the office as long as he chose. There seemed no further need

of worry. As soon as he was installed in office they would live in

style becoming their social position. About the end of February he rode

to Palmyra to be sworn in. Returning he was drenched by a storm of rain

and sleet, arriving at last half frozen. His system was in no condition

to resist such a shock. Pneumonia followed; physicians came with

torments of plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief.

Orion returned from St. Louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by

his bed, encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he

grew daily weaker. Now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the

Tennessee land as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at

last. He uttered no regrets, no complaints. Once only he said:

“I believe if I had stayed in Tennessee I might have been worth twenty

thousand dollars to-day.”

On the morning of the 24th of March, 1847, it was evident that he could

not live many hours. He was very weak. When he spoke, now and then, it

was of the land. He said it would soon make them all rich and happy.

“Cling to the land,” he whispered. “Cling to the land, and wait. Let

nothing beguile it away from you.”

A little later he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen,

and, putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in

years.

“Let me die,” he said.

He never spoke after that. A little more, and the sad, weary life that

had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: A dreamer and a

moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier.

He ended life with less than he had begun.

XV

A YOUNG BEN FRANKLIN

For a third time death had entered the Clemens home: not only had it

brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from

the very threshold. The disaster seemed complete.

The children were dazed. Judge Clemens had been a distant, reserved

man, but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored

his uprightness and nobility of purpose. Mrs. Clemens confided to a

neighbor that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always

warm-hearted, with a deep affection for his family. They remembered

that he had never returned from a journey without bringing each one

some present, however trifling. Orion, looking out of his window next

morning, saw old Abram Kurtz, and heard him laugh. He wondered how

anybody could still laugh.

The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with

him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience,

indifference to his father’s wishes, all were remembered; a hundred

things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in

the knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his

mother took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father

lay.

“It is all right, Sammy,” she said. “What’s done is done, and it does

not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you

to promise me——”

He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her

arms.

“I will promise anything,” he sobbed, “if you won’t make me go to

school! Anything!”

His mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said:

“No, Sammy; you need not go to school any more. Only promise me to be a

better boy. Promise not to break my heart.”

So he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright,

like his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor

and justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a

serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would

be held sacred.

That night—it was after the funeral—his tendency to somnambulism

manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping together,

saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous at such

a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were

terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid on the

coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A thought

struck Mrs. Clemens:

“Sam!” she said.

He answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had

risen and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams. He walked in his

sleep several nights in succession after that. Then he slept more

soundly.

Orion returned to St. Louis. He was a very good book and job printer by

this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in

those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the

family. Pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano

and guitar, went to the town of Paris, in Monroe County, about fifty

miles away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever

remained after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund. It

was a hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong;

but she was resolute and patient, and won success. Pamela Clemens was a

noble character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in

this work.

Mrs. Clemens and her son Samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing

that the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further

education as well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be

apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament, who had lately moved from Palmyra to

Hannibal and bought a weekly Democrat paper, the Missouri Courier. The

apprentice terms were not over-liberal. They were the usual thing for

that time: board and clothes—“more board than clothes, and not much of

either,” Mark Twain used to say.

“I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but

I didn’t get them. I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament’s old

garments, which didn’t fit me in any noticeable way. I was only about

half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if

I had on a circus tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to

make them short enough.”

There was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named

Wales McCormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. Ament’s clothes were

too small for Wales, but he had to wear them, and Sam Clemens and Wales

McCormick together, fitted out with Ament’s clothes, must have been a

picturesque pair. There was also, for a time, a boy named Ralph; but he

appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the

memory of him has become dim.

The apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old

slave-cook and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer’s

“devils” made it so lively there that in due time they were promoted to

the family table, where they sat with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and the one

journeyman, Pet McMurry—a name that in itself was an inspiration. What

those young scamps did not already know Pet McMurry could teach them.

Sam Clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards

of boyhood. He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn,

kind, and truthful. Angels could hardly be more than that in a

printing-office; but when food was scarce even an angel—a young printer

angel—could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for

raw potatoes, onions, and apples which they carried into the office,

where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they

cooked on the office stove. Wales especially had a way of cooking a

potato that his associate never forgot.

It is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of

Sam Clemens at this period. But we may imagine him from a letter which,

long years after, Pet McMurry wrote to Mark Twain. He said:

If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little

sandy-haired boy* of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the

printing-office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham drugstore, mounted

upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge cigar or a

diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the

poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside: “If

ever I get up again, I’ll stay up—if I kin.” . . . Do you recollect any

of the serious conflicts that mirth-loving brain of yours used to get

you into with that diminutive creature Wales McCormick—how you used to

call upon me to hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely

through him?

* The color of Mark Twain’s hair in early life has been variously

referred to as red, black, and brown. It was, in fact, as stated by

McMurry, “sandy” in boyhood, deepening later to that rich, mahogany

tone known as auburn.

This is good testimony, without doubt. When he had been with Ament

little more than a year Sam had become office favorite and chief

standby. Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was

given to Sam Clemens. He could set type as accurately and almost as

rapidly as Pet McMurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better

than Pet; and he could run the job-press to the tune of “Annie Laurie”

or “Along the Beach at Rockaway,” without missing a stroke or losing a

finger. Sometimes, at odd moments, he would “set up” one of the popular

songs or some favorite poem like “The Blackberry Girl,” and of these he

sent copies printed on cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl

friends; also to Puss Quarles, on his uncle’s farm, where he seldom

went now, because he was really grown up, associating with men and

doing a man’s work. He had charge of the circulation—which is to say,

he carried the papers. During the last year of the Mexican War, when a

telegraph-wire found its way across the Mississippi to Hannibal—a long

sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight—he

was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the

burning importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the

field of battle, spurred him to endeavors that won plaudits and

success.

He became a sort of subeditor. When the forms of the paper were ready

to close and Ament was needed to supply more matter, it was Sam who was

delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor

with him until the required copy was produced. Thus it was he saw

literature in the making.

It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own. His

chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet

McMurry; to drift up and down the world in Pet’s untrammeled fashion;

to see all that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared

to have overlooked. He varied on occasion from this ambition. When the

first negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for

a brief period to be a magnificent “middle man” or even the “end-man”

of that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the

day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of

spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist

arrived, he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the

marvel of his performance.

In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree,

but had been pretending throughout—a statement always denied by his

mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never

could be. Sam Clemens’s tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest

that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his

consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness

of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely

“showing off” and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of a

vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without

incurring responsibility of any sort. But there was a penalty: he must

allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these

tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. It is difficult

to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could

permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be

thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most

unmesmeric sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by

pretending, but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric

control. At all events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though

in the end he concluded to stick to printing as a trade.

We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. At Ament’s

he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work,

after which he was free. When he had got the hang of his work he was

usually done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the

cave, as in the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes

with Laura Hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff

overlooking the river, Lover’s Leap.

He was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where

old-fashioned games—Forfeits, Ring-around-a-Rosy, Dusty Miller, and the

like—were regarded as rare amusements. He was a favorite with girls of

his own age. He was always good-natured, though he played jokes on

them, too, and was often a severe trial. He was with Laura Hawkins more

than the others, usually her escort. On Saturday afternoons in winter

he carried her skates to Bear Creek and helped her to put them on.

After which they skated “partners,” holding hands tightly, and were a

likely pair of children, no doubt. In The Gilded Age Laura Hawkins at

twelve is pictured “with her dainty hands propped into the

ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron . . . a vision to warm the coldest

heart and bless and cheer the saddest.” The author had the real Laura

of his childhood in his mind when he wrote that, though the story

itself bears no resemblance to her life.

They were never really sweethearts, those two. They were good friends

and comrades. Sometimes he brought her magazines—exchanges from the

printing—office—Godey’s and others. These were a treat, for such things

were scarce enough. He cared little for reading, himself, beyond a few

exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of

miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for

general knowledge. It needed only to be awakened.

XVI

THE TURNING-POINT

There came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly

trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal

proportions. He was on his way from the office to his home one

afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a

leaf from a book. At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it

at all, but any printed page had acquired a professional interest for

him now. He caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from

some history of Joan of Arc. The “maid” was described in the cage at

Rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen

her clothes. There was a brief description and a good deal of

dialogue—her reproaches and their ribald replies.

He had never heard of the subject before. He had never read any

history. When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read

everything obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep

compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward

her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history.

It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a

lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the

Recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl.

The incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his

interest in all history—the world’s story in its many phases—a passion

which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained

with him until his very last day on earth. From the moment when that

fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the

world’s mentally elect was assured. It gave him his cue—the first word

of a part in the human drama. It crystallized suddenly within him

sympathy with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery,

scorn for the divine rights of kings. A few months before he died he

wrote a paper on “The Turning-point of My Life.” For some reason he did

not mention this incident. Yet if there was a turning-point in his

life, he reached it that bleak afternoon on the streets of Hannibal

when a stray leaf from another life was blown into his hands.

He read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French

wars, and to Joan in particular. He acquired an appetite for history in

general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become

a student. Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French and

German. There was no opportunity to acquire French, that he could

discover, but there was a German shoemaker in Hannibal who agreed to

teach his native tongue. Sam Clemens got a friend—very likely it was

John Briggs—to form a class with him, and together they arranged for

lessons. The shoemaker had little or no English. They had no German. It

would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a “word-book,”

and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began

reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence:

“De hain eet flee whoop in de hayer.”

“Dere!” he said, triumphantly; “you know dose vord?”

The students looked at each other helplessly.

The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he

asked if they recognized it.

Then in despair he showed them the book. It was an English primer, and

the sentence was:

“The hen, it flies up in the air.”

They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn,

not English—not under the circumstances. Later, Sam made an attempt at

Latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying:

“No, that language is not for me. I’ll do well enough to learn

English.” A boy who took it up with him became a Latin scholar.

His prejudice against oppression he put into practice. Boys who were

being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. Sometimes, watching

a game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way:

“You mustn’t cheat that boy.” And the cheating stopped. When it didn’t,

there was a combat, with consequences.

XVII

THE HANNIBAL “JOURNAL”

Orion returned from St. Louis. He felt that he was needed in Hannibal

and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight;

there was more real return for the family fund. His sister Pamela was

teaching a class in Hannibal at this time. Orion was surprised when his

mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. Any outward

display of affection was new to him.

The family had moved back across the street by this time. With Sam

supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least

a semblance of comfort. But Orion was not satisfied. Then, as always,

he had a variety of vague ambitions. Oratory appealed to him, and he

delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied

chiefly by Pamela. He aspired to the study of law, a recurring

inclination throughout his career. He also thought of the ministry, an

ambition which Sam shared with him for a time. Every mischievous boy

has it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons.

“It was the most earnest ambition I ever had,” Mark Twain once

remarked, thoughtfully. “Not that I ever really wanted to be a

preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be

damned. It looked like a safe job.”

A periodical ambition of Orion’s was to own and conduct a paper in

Hannibal. He felt that in such a position he might become a power in

Western journalism. Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal

Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own

political ambitions. Now Orion considered it for himself. The paper was

for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which

would secure ownership. Sam’s two years at Ament’s were now complete,

and Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at

eleven was taken out of school to learn typesetting.

Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and

independence.

“I followed all the advice I received,” he says in his record. “If two

or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the

last.”

He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help:

wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night.

The others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He

had the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all;

that all must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he

wrote afterward:

I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a

good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I

begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof,

and Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the

form the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam

complained with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on

Henry’s dirty proofs.

Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too

desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant

that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper

throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But

the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and

Orion’s enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He

became still more exacting.

It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements

to become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree

his natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after

the long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy

of fifteen would employ the evening—at least not every evening—in

reading beneficial books. The river was always near at hand—for

swimming in the summer and skating in the winter—and once even at this

late period it came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one

winter’s night when with another boy he had skated until nearly

midnight. They were about in the middle of the river when they heard a

terrific and grinding noise near the shore. They knew what it was. The

ice was breaking up, and they set out for home forthwith. It was

moonlight, and they could tell the ice from the water, which was a good

thing, for there were wide cracks toward the shore, and they had to

wait for these to close. They were an hour making the trip, and just

before they reached the bank they came to a broad space of water. The

ice was lifting and falling and crunching all around them. They waited

as long as they dared and decided to leap from cake to cake. Sam made

the crossing without accident, but his companion slipped in when a few

feet from shore. He was a good swimmer and landed safely, but the bath

probably cost him his hearing. He was taken very ill. One disease

followed another, ending with scarlet fever and deafness.

There was also entertainment in the office itself. A country boy named

Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade—a green, good-natured, bashful

boy. In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam

felt that it was his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him,

tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied.

They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping

at night and left him “holding the bag” in the old traditional fashion

while they slipped off home and went to bed.

But Jim Wolfe’s masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook

on his own account. Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one

night—a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. Jim

would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and

always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela

Clemens. Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below

and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that

began just beneath their window. Down at the eaves was the small arbor,

green in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. They could

hear the candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans

of candy to cool. By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the

little arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came

plainly to the boys up-stairs. About this time there appeared on the

roof from somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing

duel of charge and recrimination. Jim detested the noise, and perhaps

was gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. He had nothing

to throw at them, but he said:

“For two cents I’d get out there and knock their heads off.”

“You wouldn’t dare to do it,” Sam said, purringly.

This was wormwood to Jim. He was really a brave spirit.

“I would too,” he said, “and I will if you say that again.”

“Why, Jim, of course you wouldn’t dare to go out there. You might catch

cold.”

“You wait and see,” said Jim Wolfe.

He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window,

and crept out on the snowy roof. There was a crust of ice on the snow,

but Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his

legs bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter

breeze. Then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in

the snow each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. The cats

were on the corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously

worked his way in that direction. The roof was not very steep. He was

doing well enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted

until it was nearly solid ice. He was so intent on the cats that he did

not notice this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust

nothing yielded. A second later Jim’s feet had shot out from under him,

and he vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little

vine-clad arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers,

gathered there with their pans of cooling taffy. There were wild

shrieks and a general flight. Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got

back to their room, but Jim was overcome with the enormity of his

offense, while Sam was in an agony of laughter.

“You did it splendidly, Jim,” he drawled, when he could speak. “Nobody

could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of

there? I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it

that way. And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. How did

you ever think of it?”

It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his

place in spite of what he must have suffered. The boys made him one of

them soon after that. His initiation was thought to be complete.

An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story Mark

Twain ever told. He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy

McDaniel, the baker’s son, as they sat looking out over the river,

eating gingerbread. His hearer laughed immoderately, and the

story-teller was proud and happy in his success.

XVIII

THE BEGINNING OF A LITERARY LIFE

Orion’s paper continued to go downhill. Following some random counsel,

he changed the name of it and advanced the price—two blunders. Then he

was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates.

He was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures

to keep pace with his declining circulation—a fatal sign. A publisher

must lead his subscription list, not follow it.

“I was walking backward,” he said, “not seeing where I stepped.”

In desperation he broke away and made a trip to Tennessee to see if

something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother Sam in

charge of the office. It was a journey without financial results; yet

it bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of Mark Twain’s literary

career.

Sam, in his brother’s absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way

that would liven up the circulation. He had never done any writing—not

for print—but he had the courage of his inclinations. His local items

were of a kind known as “spicy”; his personals brought prompt demand

for satisfaction. The editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was

said to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. Sam gave a

picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the

affair. Then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them

upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim

wading out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water.

When this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large.

The press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. The

satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal

office, then he left town and did not come back any more. The embryo

Mark Twain also wrote a poem. It was addressed “To Mary in Hannibal,”

but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all

the letters in Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied

their place with a dash, with a startling result. Such were the early

flickerings of a smoldering genius. Orion returned, remonstrated, and

apologized. He reduced Sam to the ranks. In later years he saw his

mistake.

“I could have distanced all competitors even then,” he said, “if I had

recognized Sam’s ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from

offending worthy persons.”

Sam was subdued, but not done for. He never would be, now. He had got

his first taste of print, and he liked it. He promptly wrote two

anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia

Saturday Evening Post. They were accepted—without payment, of course,

in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt

suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. This was in 1851.

“Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that

line I have ever experienced since,” he said, nearly sixty years later.

Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post.

Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once

something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and

another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe

with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe

out of the country. No contributions of this time have been preserved.

High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal

containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned

and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough.

His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being

mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy—even a precocious

boy—is likely to be. He was not especially precocious—not in

literature. His literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle

along for many years yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the

fuller, statelier swing which would bring a greater joy to the world at

large, even if not to himself, than that first, far-off triumph.*

* In Mark Twain’s sketch “My First Literary Venture” he has set down

with characteristic embroideries some account of this early authorship.

Those were hard financial days. Orion could pay nothing on his mortgage

—barely the interest. He had promised Sam three dollars and a half a

week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes

—“poor, shabby clothes,” he says in his record.

“My mother and sister did the housekeeping. My mother was cook. She

used the provisions I supplied her. We therefore had a regular diet of

bacon, butter, bread, and coffee.”

Mrs. Clemens again took a few boarders; Pamela, who had given up

teaching for a time, organized another music class. Orion became

despondent. One night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and

ate up two composition rollers. Orion felt that fate was dealing with a

heavy hand. Another disaster quickly followed. Fire broke out in the

office, and the loss was considerable. An insurance company paid one

hundred and fifty dollars. With it Orion replaced such articles as were

absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room

of the Clemens dwelling. He raised the one-story part of the building

to give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years,

by hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag

along. It was the fire that furnished Sam Clemens with his Jim Wolfe

sketch. In it he stated that Jim in his excitement had carried the

office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan.

In the meantime Pamela Clemens married. Her husband was a well-to-do

merchant, William A. Moffett, formerly of Hannibal, but then of St.

Louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial

home.

Orion tried the experiment of a serial story. He wrote to a number of

well-known authors in the East, but was unable to find one who would

supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. Finally he

obtained a translation of a French novel for the sum offered, which was

five dollars. It did not save the sinking ship, however. He made the

experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. He noticed that even his

mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news.

This was a final blow.

“I sat down in the dark,” he says, “the moon glinting in at the open

door. I sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float.”

He had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office—the

amount of the mortgage—and in his moonlight reverie he decided to

dispose of it on those terms. This was in 1853.

His brother Samuel was no longer with him. Several months before, in

June, Sam decided he would go out into the world. He was in his

eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he

had grown restless in unrewarded service. Beyond his mastery of the

trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. Once when he

had asked Orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, Orion,

exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated

him for thinking of such extravagance. Soon afterward Sam confided to

his mother that he was going away; that he believed Orion hated him;

that there was no longer a place for him at home. He said he would go

to St. Louis, where Pamela was. There would be work for him in St.

Louis, and he could send money home. His intention was to go farther

than St. Louis, but he dared not tell her. His mother put together

sadly enough the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward

boy; then she held up a little Testament:

“I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam,” she said, “and

make me a promise.”

If one might have a true picture of that scene: the slim, wiry woman of

forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed,

tender, and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of

seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. Mother and

son, they were of the same metal and the same mold.

“I want you to repeat after me, Sam, these words,” Jane Clemens said.

“I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of

liquor while I am gone.”

He repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him.

“Remember that, Sam, and write to us,” she said.

“And so,” Orion records, “he went wandering in search of that comfort

and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed

to find where I was—gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. I not only missed

his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment.”

XIX

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FRANKLIN

He went to St. Louis by the night boat, visited his sister Pamela, and

found a job in the composing-room of the Evening News. He remained on

the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world.

The “world” was New York City, where the Crystal Palace Fair was then

going on. The railway had been completed by this time, but he had not

traveled on it. It had not many comforts; several days and nights were

required for the New York trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful

experience. He felt that even Pet McMurry could hardly have done

anything to surpass it. He arrived in New York with two or three

dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of

his coat.

New York was a great and amazing city. It almost frightened him. It

covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens

boasted that one day it would cover it all. The World’s Fair building,

the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out. It was where Bryant Park is

now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Young Clemens classed it

as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. A

portion of a letter to his sister Pamela has been preserved and is

given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing

specimen of his composition. The fragment concludes what was doubtless

an exhaustive description.

From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight—the flags of

the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering

jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro

’tis a perfect fairy palace—beautiful beyond description.

The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot enumerate

any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 1 o’clock). It

would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and I

was only in a little over two hours to-night. I only glanced at about

one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, I have enumerated

scarcely any of even the principal objects. The visitors to the Palace

average 6,000 daily—double the population of Hannibal. The price of

admission being 50 cents, they take in about $3,000.

The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace

—from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country

around. The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the

greatest wonder yet. Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the

Hudson River, and pass through the country to Westchester County, where

a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New York. From

the reservoir in the city to the Westchester County reservoir the

distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they could easily

supply every family in New York with one hundred barrels of water per

day!

I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go to

the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as Ma

thinks he is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy

entirely. Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and working

hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. I am used to it now,

though, and it is no trouble. Where is it Orion’s going to? Tell Ma my

promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my health I will take her

to Ky. in the spring—I shall save money for this. Tell Jim (Wolfe) and

all the rest of them to write, and give me all the news ….

(It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at 6, and am at work at

7.) You ask where I spend my evenings. Where would you suppose, with a

free printer’s library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a

quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to? Write soon.