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Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete

by Albert Bigelow Paine · English · Gutenberg #2988 · 2,949,628 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete

Author: Albert Bigelow Paine


        
Release date: October 4, 2004 [eBook #2988]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2988

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN: A BIOGRAPHY. COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY

THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS

BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE




VOLUME I. Part 1: 1835-1866



TO CLARA CLEMENS GABRILOWITSCH WHO STEADILY UPHELD THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE
TO WRITE HISTORY RATHER THAN EULOGY AS THE STORY OF HER FATHER'S LIFE




AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Dear William Dean Howells, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Joseph T. Goodman,
and other old friends of Mark Twain:

I cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you
who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their
making.

First, I want to confess how I have envied you your association with
Mark Twain in those days when you and he “went gipsying, a long time
ago.” Next, I want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me
so unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in
the nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who
follow him. And, lastly, I want to tell you that I do not envy you so
much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your
grace, I have gone gipsying with you all. Neither do I wonder now, for
I have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater
unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed
it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory
would have contented your hearts.

My gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land
so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed
to the story. Only, I seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words.

Albert Bigelow Paine.




PREFATORY NOTE

Certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ
materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the
writings of Mr. Clemens himself. Mark Twain's spirit was built of the
very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his
earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were
autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place,
or circumstance--seeking, as he said, “only to tell a good story”--while
in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made
history difficult, even when, as in his so-called “Autobiography,” his
effort was in the direction of fact.

“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or
not,” he once said, quaintly, “but I am getting old, and soon I shall
remember only the latter.”

The reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer
of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources:
letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also
from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity
of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed
items.




MARK TWAIN--A BIOGRAPHY




I. ANCESTORS

On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until
his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man
of wide repute “for his want of energy,” and in a marginal note he has
written:

“I guess this is where our line starts.”

It was like him to write that. It spoke in his whimsical fashion the
attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was
his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in
his work.

Historically, we need not accept this identity of the Clemens ancestry.
The name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in
Rome. There was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and
again in the annals of the Middle Ages. More lately there was a Gregory
Clemens, an English landowner who became a member of Parliament under
Cromwell and signed the death-warrant of Charles I. Afterward he was
tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was
exposed on a pole on the top of Westminster Hall.

Tradition says that the family of Gregory Clemens did not remain in
England, but emigrated to Virginia (or New Jersey), and from them, in
direct line, descended the Virginia Clemenses, including John Marshall
Clemens, the father of Mark Twain. Perhaps the line could be traced, and
its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less
need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be
written.

Of Mark Twain's immediate forebears, however, there is something to be
said. His paternal grandfather, whose name also was Samuel, was a man of
culture and literary taste. In 1797 he married a Virginia girl, Pamela
Goggin; and of their five children John Marshall Clemens, born August
11, 1798, was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of
seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising. The
family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work.
As a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at Lynchburg, and
doubtless studied at night. At all events, he acquired an education, but
injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother
and the younger children, removed to Adair County, Kentucky, where the
widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one Simon Hancock,
a good man. In due course, John Clemens was sent to Columbia, the
countyseat, to study law. When the living heirs became of age he
administered his father's estate, receiving as his own share three
negro slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the Clemens
effects to this day.

This was in 1821. John Clemens was now a young man of twenty-three,
never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and
a heart full of hope and dreams. Sober, industrious, and unswervingly
upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark. That he was
likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then
regarded as a misfortune.

It was two years later that he met Jane Lampton; whose mother was a
Casey--a Montgomery-Casey whose father was of the Lamptons (Lambtons)
of Durham, England, and who on her own account was reputed to be the
handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all
Kentucky. The Montgomeries and the Caseys of Kentucky had been Indian
fighters in the Daniel Boone period, and grandmother Casey, who had been
Jane Montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved
her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer. The
Montgomery and Casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and
there is to-day a Casey County next to Adair, with a Montgomery County
somewhat farther east. As for the Lamptons, there is an earldom in
the English family, and there were claimants even then in the American
branch. All these things were worth while in Kentucky, but it was rare
Jane Lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her
grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that
won the heart of John Marshall Clemens, swept him off his feet almost at
the moment of their meeting. Many of the characteristics that made Mark
Twain famous were inherited from his mother. His sense of humor,
his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her
contribution to his fame. Speaking of her in a later day, he once said:

“She had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in
woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not
knowing it to be humorous.”

She bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion;
her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and
the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and
perfect setting.

It was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of Jane Lampton and
John Marshall Clemens. All her life, Jane Clemens honored her husband,
and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had
been a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her
prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than
tenderness. She stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and
on May 6, 1823, they were married. She was then twenty; her husband
twenty-five. More than sixty years later, when John Clemens had long
been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an Old
Settlers' Convention, because among the names of those attending she had
noticed the name of the lover of her youth. She meant to humble herself
to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. She arrived too late;
the convention was over, and he was gone. Mark Twain once spoke of this,
and added:

“It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my
personal experience in a long lifetime.”




II. THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS

With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, John
Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business
mistakes. It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute
confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from
one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived.
About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in
Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River,
and here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born. They named him
Orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent
to the first syllable, calling it Orion. Gainsborough was a small place
with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or
furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown,
Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains. Yet
Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of
his fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east
Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. He took
an immediate and active interest in the development of the place,
established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was
promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court.

It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for
himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land. Grants could
be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre,
and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when
the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a
hundred thousandfold. There was no wrong estimate in that. Land covered
with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals,
could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire
purchase of 75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500.
The great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown.
Standing in the door of the Court House he had built, looking out over
the “Knob” of the Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he
said:

“Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. I may not live to see
these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will.”

Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the “Tennessee land,”
 which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden
vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream
fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of
phantom riches, The Gilded Age.

Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come
true he was in no wise to blame. The land is priceless now, and a
corporation of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of
a thin fragment of it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some
survey.

Believing the future provided for, Clemens turned his attention to
present needs. He built himself a house, unusual in its style and
elegance. It had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered
with plastering, something which no one in Jamestown had ever seen
before. He was regarded as an aristocrat. He wore a swallow-tail coat
of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. The
blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar
and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time.
His wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore
homespun linsey-woolsey. The new house was referred to as the Crystal
Palace. When John and Jane Clemens attended balls--there were continuous
balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful
dancers.

Jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. It attained
almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log
houses--and stopped there. The country, too, was sparsely settled; law
practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to
court was very bad for one of his physique. John Clemens saw his reserve
of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise. He
built himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods. These
he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and
other produce of the country, which he took to Louisville every spring
and fall in six-horse wagons. In the mean time he would seem to have
sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital. There
was a second baby now--a little girl, Pamela,--born in September, 1827.
Three years later, May 1830, another little girl, Margaret, came. By
this time the store and home were in one building, the store occupying
one room, the household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were
declining.

About a year after little Margaret was born, John Clemens gave up
Jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles
distant, known as the Three Forks of Wolf. The Tennessee land was safe,
of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time
the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard.

He could not have remained at the Three Forks long, for in 1832 we find
him at still another place, on the right bank of Wolf River, where
a post-office called Pall Mall was established, with John Clemens as
postmaster, usually addressed as “Squire” or “Judge.” A store was run
in connection with the postoffice. At Pall Mall, in June, 1832, another
boy, Benjamin, was born.

The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens
himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank
of the river. He no longer practised law. In The Gilded Age we have
Mark Twain's picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from
descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother
Orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an
exaggerated presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time. The
chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. The reader
may look it up for himself, if he chooses. If he does he will not wonder
that Jane Clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and
her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or
that John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his
environment--was rapidly getting out of heart. After all the bright
promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed
dwindling away.

A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older
than his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called
“sunpain,” an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying
to all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and
intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community.
He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a
kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. Gray and deep-set under
bushy brows, they literally looked you through. Absolutely fearless, he
permitted none to trample on his rights. It is told of John Clemens, at
Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister
on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit,
according to the custom of that community. For some reason, the minister
put the document aside and neglected it. At the close of the service
Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to
the congregation. Those who knew Mark Twain best will not fail to recall
in him certain of his father's legacies.

The arrival of a letter from “Colonel Sellers” inviting the Hawkins
family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age. In reality the
letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens's sister,
Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It was
a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it
shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to
do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory
is likely to last as long as American history.




III. A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE

Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller
than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if
less celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively
unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a
million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. St.
Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade
with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted
region. There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines
of any consequence--scarcely any maps. For all that one could see or
guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement
like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which
those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry
the merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to
the world outside.

In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had
been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and
others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should want Jane
Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee
venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was natural,
too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write
the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles
counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set
down the number at fifty-four.

Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just
the kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be
certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer. Yet
there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens
must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers letter
ends:

“Come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!”

The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away.
The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce
were sent to Louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few
hundred dollars, John Clemens and his family “flitted out into the great
mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee.” They had a
two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their
earlier fortunes. The barouche held the parents and the three younger
children, Pamela, Margaret, anal the little boy, Benjamin. There were
also two extra horses, which Orion, now ten, and Jennie, the house-girl,
a slave, rode. This was early in the spring of 1835.

They traveled by the way of their old home at Columbia, and paid a visit
to relatives. At Louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for St.
Louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into
what was then the Far West, the promised land.

They arrived one evening, and if Florida was not quite all in appearance
that John Clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with John
Quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. The great Mississippi
was less than fifty miles away. Salt River, with a system of locks and
dams, would certainly become navigable to the Forks, with Florida as its
head of navigation. It was a Sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be
said here that John Quarles was not the chief original of that lovely
character in The Gilded Age. That was another relative--James Lampton,
a cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial
dreams.

John Quarles was already established in merchandise in Florida, and was
prospering in a small way. He had also acquired a good farm, which he
worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading
citizen of the community. He offered John Clemens a partnership in his
store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land. Furthermore,
he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. Thus far, at least,
the Florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could
not be worse than they had been in Tennessee.

In a small frame building near the center of the village, John and Jane
Clemens established their household. It was a humble one-story affair,
with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for
its size, and comparatively new. It is still standing and occupied when
these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as
a shrine for the American people; for it was here that the foremost
American-born author--the man most characteristically American in every
thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering
breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come
would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king.

It was on a bleak day, November 30, 1835, that he entered feebly the
domain he was to conquer. Long, afterward, one of those who knew him
best said:

“He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never
quite of this race or kind.”

He may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it
would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the
far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. But nobody thought of this,
then.

He was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his
coming. Perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so
sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. One
Polly Ann Buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any
sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[This honor has been claimed
also for Mrs. Millie Upton and a Mrs. Damrell. Probably all were present
and assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then.
It was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. Still, John
Clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in
a new land, for he named the little boy Samuel, after his father, and
added the name of an old and dear Virginia friend, Langhorne. The family
fortunes would seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have
regarded the arrival of another son as a good omen.

With a family of eight, now, including Jennie, the slavegirl, more room
was badly needed, and he began building without delay. The result was
not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but
it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. The rooms were
larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and
dining-room uses. This house, completed in 1836, occupied by the Clemens
family during the remainder of the years spent in Florida, was often
in later days pointed out as Mark Twain's birthplace. It missed that
distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having
sheltered his early childhood.--[This house is no longer standing. When
it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off and
manufactured into souvenirs. Mark Twain himself disclaimed it as
his birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: “No, it is too
stylish, it is not my birthplace.”]




IV. BEGINNING A LONG JOURNEY

It was not a robust childhood. The new baby managed to go through
the winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. Added
strength came, but slowly; “Little Sam,” as they called him, was always
delicate during those early years.

It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and
contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that
embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John Clemens
seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. He looked after
their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave
advice on occasion. He bought a book now and then--sometimes a
picture-book--and subscribed for Peter Parley's Magazine, a marvel of
delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements,
and he rarely, or never, laughed. Mark Twain did not remember ever
having seen or heard his father laugh. The problem of supplying food was
a somber one to John Clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion
machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the
inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. Jane Clemens was busy,
too. Her sense of humor did not die, but with added cares and years her
temper as well as her features became sharper, and it was just as well
to be fairly out of range when she was busy with her employments.

Little Sam's companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than
himself: Orion, ten years his senior, followed by Pamela and Margaret at
intervals of two and three years, then by Benjamin, a kindly little lad
whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother,
three years his junior. But in addition to these associations, there
were the still more potent influences Of that day and section, the
intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of
the slaves. All the children of that time were fond of the negroes
and confided in them. They would, in fact, have been lost without such
protection and company.

It was Jennie, the house-girl, and Uncle Ned, a man of all
work--apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real
charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. Wonderful
entertainment it was. That was a time of visions and dreams, small.
gossip and superstitions. Old tales were repeated over and over, with
adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. At evening
the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open
fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting
legends. Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of
this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror
and delight of its curdling thrill. The tales always began with “Once
'pon a time,” and one of them was the story of the “Golden Arm” which
the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider
audiences in many lands. Briefly it ran as follows:

“Once 'Pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a' arm
of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and
one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and
tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she
was his wife; and she says:

“W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r's my
g-o-l-den arm?”

As Uncle Ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first
one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn
up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like
claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms
before him. The tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting
each time for a reply. The culmination came with a pounce on one of the
group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of:

“YOU'VE got it!' and she tore him all to pieces!”

And the children would shout “Lordy!” and look furtively over their
shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall;
but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the
flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up
on another. Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to
follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods.

“Once 'pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road
and he come to a ha'nted house, and he heard de chains'a-rattlin' and
a-rattlin' and a-rattlin', and a ball of fire come rollin' up and
got under his stirrup, and it didn't make no difference if his horse
galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his
stirrup till he got plum to de front do', and his wife come out and say:
'My Gord, dat's devil fire!' and she had to work a witch spell to drive
it away.”

“How big was it, Uncle Ned?”

“Oh, 'bout as big as your head, and I 'spect it's likely to come down
dis yere chimney 'most any time.”

Certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the
imagination of a delicate child. All the games and daily talk concerned
fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities. The
children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs,
all learned of their negro guardians.

But if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the
children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. The greatest real
dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. A runaway
slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when
caught. Once the children saw one brought into Florida by six men who
took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound
him with ropes. His groans were loud and frequent. Such things made an
impression that would last a lifetime.

Slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. Jennie
especially was often saucy and obstreperous. Jane Clemens, with more
strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for
insolence, whereupon Jennie snatched the whip from her hand. John
Clemens was sent for in haste. He came at once, tied Jennie's wrists
together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the
shoulders with a cowhide. These were things all calculated to impress a
sensitive child.

In pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting
berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine,
picking the petals from daisies to the formula “Love me-love me not,”
 always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their
small darky followers. Shoes were taken off the first of April. For
a time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon
disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. One of their dreads
was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was
liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. They
knew what lockjaw was--Uncle John Quarles's black man, Dan, was subject
to it. Sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt
the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and
greens, or the piece of 'possum he was eating, while his mouth remained
a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural
position by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh
lifted an ox.

Uncle John Quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources
of never-ending delight. Perhaps the farm was just an ordinary Missouri
farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these
things were never apparent. There was a halo about anything that
belonged to Uncle John Quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious
kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. To visit at his house was
for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. When the
children came for eggs he would say:

“Your hens won't lay, eh? Tell your maw to feed 'em parched corn and
drive 'em uphill,” and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his
small hearers.

Also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and
tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. He would
make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but
never executed any of them. When they were out fishing and returned late
he would say:

“You--if I have to hunt you again after dark, I will make you smell like
a burnt horn!”

Nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children,
with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if
it ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar
savor. Altogether it was a curious early childhood that Little Sam
had--at least it seems so to us now. Doubtless it was commonplace enough
for that time and locality.




V. THE WAY OF FORTUNE

Perhaps John Quarles's jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general
conduct did not altogether harmonize with John Clemens's more taciturn
business methods. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of
dreams, Clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in
order. He had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and
confusion, which very likely were the chief features of John Quarles's
storekeeping. At all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of
two or three years, and Clemens opened business for himself across the
street. He also practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected
justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of “Judge.” He
needed some one to assist in the store, and took in Orion, who was
by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth,
Orion--all his days a visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with
no taste for commerce. Then a partnership was formed with a man who
developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster in
the end. The modest tide of success which had come with John Clemens's
establishment at Florida had begun to wane. Another boy, Henry, born in
July, 1838, added one more responsibility to his burdens.

There still remained a promise of better things. There seemed at least a
good prospect that the scheme for making Salt River navigable was likely
to become operative. With even small boats (bateaux) running as high as
the lower branch of the South Fork, Florida would become an emporium of
trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap
a harvest. An act of the Legislature was passed incorporating the
navigation company, with Judge Clemens as its president. Congress was
petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement. So confident
was the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever
of excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual
construction of a bateau; but a Democratic Congress turned its back on
the proposed improvement. No boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended Salt
River, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party
of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned,
puffing up the stream. An old Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when he heard of
it, said:

“I don't doubt a word they say. In Scotland, it often happens that when
people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits
abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a
looking-glass. That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat.”

But John Quarles, who was present, laughed:

“If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were,” he
said. “They were the Democratic candidates at the last election. They
killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them. Their
ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat.”

It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled
far, was the origin of the term “Going up Salt River,” as applied to
defeated political candidates.--[The dictionaries give this phrase as
probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in Kentucky; but it
seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in Quarles's witty
comment.]

No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River.
Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such
thought. Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and
easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and
dams. Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and
became mere scenery. Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the
Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida
nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day. Perhaps such
close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of
this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career
of the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain.




VI. A NEW HOME

The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the
Clemens family in Florida. Doubtless it hastened their departure. There
was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck,
rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring
about a judgment. Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good
luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. That same day,
when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school, Margaret
laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks,
pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down.

She was never in her right mind again. The doctor was sent for and
diagnosed the case “bilious fever.” One evening, about nine o'clock,
Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when
the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in
from his bedroom, fast asleep. He came to the side of the trundle-bed
and pulled at the bedding near Margaret's shoulder for some time before
he woke. Next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it
was known that she could not live. About a week later she died. She
was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks,
black hair, and bright eyes. This was in August, 1839. It was Little
Sam's first sight of death--the first break in the Clemens family: it
left a sad household. The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to
have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the
funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery,
exactly as it happened.

Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was
without one great comforting thought--the future of the Tennessee land.
It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill.

“When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right,” was the
refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for
him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days.
Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress.
When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest
ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. When
conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even
to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine
offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was
always refused after a little consideration.

“We will struggle along somehow, Jane,” he would say. “We will not throw
away the children's fortune.”

There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land--Jane Clemens's
favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal
optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always
had “millions in it”--everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily,
in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into
figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining
those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as “our
kindred,” casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the “present
earl.” Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he created
Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in The
Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. The words
“Tennessee land,” with their golden promise, became his earliest
remembered syllables. He grew to detest them in time, for they came to
mean mockery.

One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty
dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered.
Then, of course, it was scornfully refused. In some autobiographical
chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said:

“If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have
been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the
Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations.”

What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in
the beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which,
though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a
steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade
already established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well
chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day.

He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.
He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder
overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was
ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason,
his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being
always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of
deliberate desertion.

“The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a
few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they
had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world
would have seen how I was treated and would have cried 'Shame!'”

This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously
confused with another, in Mark Twain's mind. In an autobiographical
chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to
Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded
family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but
later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an absent-minded
family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to
fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four,
behind. --[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain's memory
played him many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through
his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to
the actual occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but
occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author's
purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record
straight.]




VII. THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL. Hannibal in 1839 was already a
corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. It was a town
with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true
Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned,
though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at
least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be
less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and
it was tranquilly content. Mark Twain remembered it as “the white town
drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,... the great Mississippi,
the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along;... the
dense forest away on the other side.”

The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with
bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south,
the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in
the way of setting.

The river, of course, was the great highway. Rafts drifted by;
steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside
world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away.
Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on
airs accordingly. It had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and
the town drunkards (“General” Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben
Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and
tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats,
ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive
color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. These and their families constituted
the true aristocracy of the Southern town. Most of them had pleasant
homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after
the manner of all Southern architecture of that period, which had an
undoubted Greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said,
accessible to the builders of those days. Most of them, also, had
means--slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their
professional earnings. They lived in such style as was considered
fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable.

It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family
belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the
comforts or the ostentation of his class. He settled his family and
belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street--the Pavey Hotel; his
merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a
new suit of clothes, as clerk. Possibly the clothes gave Orion a renewed
ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. Business did not begin
actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. A
little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the
Hannibal Journal, at his father's suggestion.

Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. He was to be
much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his
personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. He
was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater
or less degree were to go with him through life. Of a kindly, loving
disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but
always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard
of those who knew him best. His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the
whole, of a negative kind. Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency
to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits
of any sort. That was his chief misfortune. Full of whims and fancies,
unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and
influence. Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only
to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or
bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. Such a life is bound to
be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and
despair. In his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, Orion sets
down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility
which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men.

Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it
keenly. A gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land,
he was entitled to a profession. To him it was punishment, and the
disgrace weighed upon him. Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had
been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his
dinner. Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only
a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he
should electrify the world with his eloquence. He was surprised to find
how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his
trade.

Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put
to school. They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby,
was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. Little Sam was the
least promising of the flock. He remained delicate, and developed little
beyond a tendency to pranks. He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative
child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in
the direction of the river. He walked in his sleep, too, and often the
rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him
fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor was summoned for him
oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we
may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days.

Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of
ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles--the black,
deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He
yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys,
who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed
with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some days
later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam's bed to
see him die. According to his own after-confession, this gratified him,
and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However,
he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh
laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise
period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to
various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required.
Without doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very
young.]--He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane
Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a
comfort.

“You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” she said to him
once, in her old age.

“I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live,” he suggested, in his
tranquil fashion.

She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty
years. “No; afraid you would,” she said. But that was only her joke, for
she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers
in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her
mother's care.

It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John
Quarles's farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that
an incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole
family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June
Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied
by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive,
leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning.
The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and
Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens, his mind
far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy,
and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm.
Then he was confronted by Jane Clemens, who demanded Little Sam.

“Why,” said the judge, aghast, “I never once thought of him after I left
him asleep.”

Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily
saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal. He arrived
in the early dusk. The child was safe enough, but he was crying with
loneliness and hunger. He had spent most of the day in the locked,
deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal
ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. He was fed and
comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer
and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and
lent a coloring to his later years.




VIII. THE FARM

We have already mentioned the delight of the Clemens children in Uncle
John Quarles's farm. To Little Sam it was probably a life-saver. With
his small cousin, Tabitha,--[Tabitha Quarles, now Mrs. Greening,
of Palmyra, Missouri, has supplied most of the material for this
chapter.]--just his own age (they called her Puss), he wandered over
that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights
everywhere. A slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she was only
six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a
playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. Sometimes, indeed,
it was necessary for her to threaten to tell “Miss Patsey” or “Miss
Jane,” when her little charges insisted on going farther or staying
later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal
safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was
just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom.

The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile
made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. In the corner of the yard
were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell
away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a
divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. Down in the
pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the
children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and
then took her turn and “balanced” herself so high that their one wish
was to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way. All the woods
were full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many
birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies,
and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were
blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and
watermelons in the corn. They were not always ripe, those watermelons,
and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he
was seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him
to die forthwith.

Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned.

“Sammy will pull through,” she said; “he wasn't born to die that way.”

It is the slender constitution that bears the strain. “Sammy” did pull
through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure.

There were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from
the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy
loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat.
This last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would
dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would
pretend not to see. Then in the evening when the black woman came along,
going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows
running and jingling their bells--especially Little Sam, for he was a
wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering
and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and
shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the
grass.

His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health,
and the encouragement of John Quarles's good-natured, fun-loving slaves.

The negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. In
one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children
visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a
thousand years old and to have talked with Moses. The negroes believed
this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in
the desert, coming out of Egypt. The bald spot on her head was caused by
fright at seeing Pharaoh drowned. She also knew how to avert spells and
ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. Uncle Dan'l was a
favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw
gave him an unusual distinction. Long afterward he would become Nigger
Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his gentle
guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men.

Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle
John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. It
was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in)
connecting the two divisions. In the summer the table was set in the
middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served
in the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that
left only room for rows of plates around the edge. Fried chicken, roast
pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits,
partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be
served here. If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and
in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. His mother kept him
there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather
around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote of that
scene:

    I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its
    buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the
    trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel
    whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the
    mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-
    spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the
    dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose
    ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we
    scraped it off and ate it;... the lazy cat spread out on the
    rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs,
    blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other
    smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor
    faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black
    indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely
    death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight;
    splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle
    --out of service, but waiting with confidence.

One is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these
vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child's
sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal
everywhere in his work in the years to come. For him it was education
of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from
books.




IX. SCHOOL-DAYS

Nevertheless, on his return to Hannibal, it was decided that Little
Sam was now ready to go to school. He was about five years old, and
the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very
robust. His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the
other children put together.

“He drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house,” she used
to say; “and when he is out of it I am expecting every minute that some
one will bring him home half dead.”

He did, in fact, achieve the first of his “nine narrow escapes from
drowning” about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon
and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. When with mullein
tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: “I guess
there wasn't much danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water.”

She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands
for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. Perhaps this is
a good place to say that Jane Clemens was the original of Tom Sawyer's
“Aunt Polly,” and her portrait as presented in that book is considered
perfect. Kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older
than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes
severe, she was regarded as a “character” by her friends, and beloved by
them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know. Her
sense of pity was abnormal. She refused to kill even flies, and punished
the cat for catching mice. She, would drown the young kittens, when
necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. On coming to Hannibal,
she joined the Presbyterian Church, and her religion was of that
clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell
and Satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for
being obliged to surround himself with such poor society. Her children
she directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and
growing in grace except Little Sam. Even baby Henry at two was lisping
the prayers that Sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded.
His sister Pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him
dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle
care earned immortality as the Cousin Mary of Tom Sawyer. He would say
his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister Pamela, but he
much preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day's
adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused
his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long. They
did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius
that would one day amaze and entertain the nations. Neighbors hearing
of these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with Mrs.
Clemens.

“You don't believe anything that child says, I hope.”

“Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest is
pure gold.” At another time she said: “Sammy is a well of truth, but you
can't bring it all up in one bucket.”

This, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat
later.

A certain Miss E. Horr was selected to receive the payment for taking
charge of Little Sam during several hours each day, directing him
mentally and morally in the mean time. Her school was then in a log
house on Main Street (later it was removed to Third Street), and was of
the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in
advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to
long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of
spelling. Long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in
that school. Pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to
a Mr. Cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now
the Public Square.

Miss Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened
her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the Bible, with
explanations, and the rules of conduct. Then the A B C class was
called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no
preparation.

The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam. He calculated
how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and
still avoid disaster. He made a miscalculation during the forenoon and
received warning; a second offense would mean punishment. He did not
mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned Miss Horr
yet, and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a
stick for his own correction.

This was certainly disturbing. It was sudden, and then he did not know
much about the selection of sticks. Jane Clemens had usually used
her hand. It required a second command to get him headed in the right
direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. He had the
forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was difficult. Everything
looked too big and competent. Even the smallest switch had a wiry,
discouraging look. Across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many
shavings outside.

One had blown across and lay just in front of him. It was an
inspiration. He picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room,
meekly handed it to Miss Herr.

Perhaps Miss Horr's sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline
must be maintained.

“Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” she said (he had never heard it all strung
together in that ominous way), “I am ashamed of you! Jimmy Dunlap, go
and bring a switch for Sammy.” And Jimmy Dunlap went, and the switch was
of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for
school. He informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did
not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he
preferred to be a pirate or an Indian and scalp or drown such people as
Miss Horr. Down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she
said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him
in hand.

He returned to school, but he never learned to like it. Each morning he
went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which
he always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the
smallest curtailment of liberty. A School was ruled with a rod in those
days, a busy and efficient rod, as the Scripture recommended. Of the
smaller boys Little Sam's back was sore as often as the next, and he
dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend
with his band and capture Miss Horr and probably drag her by the hair,
as he had seen Indians and pirates do in the pictures. When the days of
early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine
lighting the soft green of Holliday's Hill, with the purple distance
beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up
with a Webster's spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human
nature could bear. Among the records preserved from that far-off day
there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is
inscribed:

                  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 balker'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 Sehns, 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.”--[This house, in 1911, was
bought by Mr. and Mrs. George A. Mahan, and presented to Hannibal for
a memorial museum.]--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:

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 warren 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. Selins'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, Selins'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.--[Much of the detail in this chapter was furnished
to the writer by John Briggs shortly before his death in 1907.]--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.

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
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.]--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.”

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--[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.]--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?

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 shin, 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.

                  Truly your brother,     SAM

    P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not
    read by it. Write, and let me know how Henry is.

It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality,
and it gives us a scale of things. Double the population of Hannibal
visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city
came a distance of thirty-eight miles! Doubtless these were amazing
statistics.

Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his
concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to
his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. He
did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion's plans were
then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a
new location. From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested
school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he
had ever seen together before. We have somehow the feeling that he had
all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was
marked by a very definite line.

The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing
establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four
dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved
them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. He lodged at a mechanics'
boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and
washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away.

He did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode
of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have
“hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to
get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. On the whole, there was
not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself
with its wonders. He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853,
and found it not easy to go. In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting
plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to
have overlooked. Among other things he says:

    I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the
    fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and, secondly,
    because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to
    leave New York every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a
    liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave
    I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I
    shall get off Tuesday, though.

    Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the
    Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The
    play was the “Gladiator.” I did not like parts of it much, but
    other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last
    act, where the “Gladiator” (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in
    all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul
    seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling
    to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play “Damon and Pythias”
     --the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia
    on Monday night.

    I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a “Journal”
     the other day, in which I see the office has been sold....

    If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about
    me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is
    not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a
    brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take
    care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid,
    however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall
    be) as “independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.”...

    Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the
    Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than
    that in the summer.

“I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New
York” is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty
years later.

He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work “subbing” on a daily
paper, 'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten
thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work
done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill
he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was
still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he returned
to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled
a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand at
writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some
reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his
contributions to the Philadelphia 'Ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary
kind. Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems
unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print.

“My efforts were not received with approval,” was all he ever said of it
afterward.

There were two or three characters in the 'Inquirer' office whom he did
not forget. One of these was an old compositor who had “held a case”
 in that office for many years. His name was Frog, and sometimes when he
went away the “office devils” would hang a line over his case, with a
hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of
this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been
in the beginning. Another old fellow there furnished amusement. He owned
a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of
fire. Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the
types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air:

“Doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in
the northwestern part of the city?” or “There go the fire-bells again!”
 and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. It was
not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens
had his share in it.

He found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money there,
for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small
amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. In a letter to
Orion--whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October
26th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and “to serve
as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia.”
 Further along he adds:

    Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people
    in it. There is only one thing that gets my “dander” up--and that
    is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me “it's no use to
    get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work
    here than you can do!” “Downhearted,” the devil! I have not had a
    particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four
    months ago. I fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me
    downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and
    am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants. When I was in Hannibal, before
    I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have
    convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from
    home.

He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its
inscription “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin,” and one is sharply reminded
of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and
Samuel Clemens. Each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his
brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly
and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman
printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human,
and of incredible popularity.

The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on
the Fairmount stage. It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a
fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing;
a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. The Wire
Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in
review. A fine residence about completed impressed him:

    It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. The pillars
    in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful,
    ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at
    the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front
    windows.... To see some of them finished and standing, and
    then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one,
    in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise
    the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble
    is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia.

There is a flavor of the 'Innocents' about it; then a little further
along:

    I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--“For Wissahickon and
    Manayunk 25 cents.” Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and
    his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I
    shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon....

    There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always
    expected to hand up a lady's money for her. Yesterday I sat in the
    front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat
    opposite me. She handed me her money, which was right. But, Lord!
    a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so
    familiar with a stranger. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front
    end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her
    fare.

There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th,
to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa,
and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th.
Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a
contributor, for the latter says:

    I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my
    letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work
    dulls one's ideas amazingly.... I believe I am the only person in
    the Inquirer office that does not drink. One young fellow makes $18
    for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent
    of it.

    How do you like “free soil”?--I would like amazingly to see a good
    old-fashioned negro. My love to all.

                  Truly your brother,     SAM

In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick.

“I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,”
 is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of
letters from home and those “not written as they should be.” “One only
has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent
friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “I don't like our present prospect
for cold weather at all.”

He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for
a boy of his age, was due. The novelty of things had worn off; it was
coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and
friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had
no part in it. Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed:

    “An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.”

He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year
longer. In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he
made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital. His stay
was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. He returned to
Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American.
Finally he went back to New York. There are no letters of this period.
His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and
in later years was only vaguely remembered. It was late in the summer of
1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West. His 'Wanderjahr'
had lasted nearly fifteen months.

He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a
smoking-car to make the journey. He was worn out when he arrived, but
stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother he was
anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself
on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or
turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine. For a long time that
missing day confused his calculations.

When he reached Orion's house the family sat at breakfast. He came in
carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a general
outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off, holding the
butt of the gun in front of him.

“You wouldn't let me buy a gun,” he said, “so I bought one myself, and I
am going to use it, now, in self-defense.”

“You, Sam! You, Sam!” cried Jane Clemens. “Behave yourself,” for she was
wary of a gun.

Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms.




XX. KEOKUK DAYS

Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office,
but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money
before he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place
on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or
early spring of the following year.

He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal
Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman
chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli.
Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the
boys were comrades and close friends. Twenty-two years later Mark Twain
exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier
time. Clemens wrote:

    MY DEAR BURROUGH,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was
    22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown
    some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a
    callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern
    in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling
    the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... That is
    what I was at 19-20.

Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk. He
had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so
characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the
operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. He
tells it himself; he says:

    At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage
    for Muscatine. We halted for dinner at Burlington. After
    despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove
    up, ready for departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe
    around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further
    to do. A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, “Miss,
    do you go by this stage?” I said, “Oh, I forgot!” and sprang out
    and helped her in. A wife was a new kind of possession to which I
    had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her.

Orion's wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens's
girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early
days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it
was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk. Brother Sam came up
from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five
dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The office at this
time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street,
in the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company. Henry
Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad by the
name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came
in for social evenings. Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who
clerked in the book-store on the ground floor.

These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher,
Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for
their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone
to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing
to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next
evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had
found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played
tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to
join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but
they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and
denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night
organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German
apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick
Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a
fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to
laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would
run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken;
seven years later Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his
forehead: this, by the way.

Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said:

“I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but
on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it
is yourself. You couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw
recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? Won't you please stop it? It
bothers my pupils.”

Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise.

“Does it?” he said, very deliberately. “Why didn't you mention it
before? To be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies.”

They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but
joined one of the singing--classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good
voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He
did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular
member of the singing-class.

They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint
fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a
“fool”--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he
kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and
indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really
light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now
and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau
rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none.
Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella
Patterson (related through Orion's wife and generally known as “Ick”),
and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were
many more. He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of
his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often
carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the
tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late,
sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed,
and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety,
because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular
short pipe of daytime use.

But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it would go out, and that would
mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the
bowl which stood on the floor. Young Brownell from below was passing
upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam
Clemens call. The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked
his head in at the door.

“What will you have, Sam?” he asked.

“Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I am in trouble. I want somebody to
light my pipe.”

“Why don't you get up and light it yourself?” Brownell asked.

“I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it
for me.”

Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it.

“What are you reading, Sam?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days I'll write
a funnier book than that, myself.”

Brownell laughed.

“No, you won't, Sam,” he said. “You are too lazy ever to write a book.”

A good many years later when the name “Mark Twain” had begun to stand
for American humor the owner of it gave his “Sandwich Island” lecture
in Keokuk. Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: “The
king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth,
except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in the
city of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell.”

The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain's life was neither very long nor
very actively important. It extended over a period of less than
two years--two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be
known--but they were not years of startling occurrence.

Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he
delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its
humor of a primitive kind. Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted
his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. He had
entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no
rival. They impressed him into a debating society after that, and there
was generally a stir of attention when Sam Clemens was about to take the
floor.

Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German
apprentice music.

“There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song
beginning:

    “Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine,
    Turkey came along and yanked him from behind.”

The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the
proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers
across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his
broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend
over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. Without
intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor's hand was
caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel. Sam
called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the
situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In
due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the
scars remained.

Orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of
prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his brother's
wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages
at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above
water.

The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for money
in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough.
His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion himself tells
how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk directory, but it
did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the work; too low in
his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as “an
antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost.

Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates
the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is
addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856.

    I don't like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry
    and Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory,
    --[Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probably
    the second one.]--I could tell before breakfast just how much work
    could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they
    throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their
    work.... I am not getting along well with the job-work. I can't
    work blindly--without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I
    calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on the
    press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he
    was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this
    morning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job-
    work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind...

The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written
to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and
introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now
possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of
the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon's account of the exploration
was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had
been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American
river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was
subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always
considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get
to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his
nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to
the detail of their achievement. In the “Turning-point” article already
mentioned he refers to this. He says:

    That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament
    has not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and many
    a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but
    these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing
    commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward.
    Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, even
    deaf persons can hear me think.

In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his
plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full
confidence.

    Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from
    Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St.
    Louis and went to New York--I can start for New York and go to South
    America.

He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but
that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements.
He fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various
influences to bear.

    I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with
    South American books: They have Herndon's report now. Ward and the
    Dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the
    office. We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our
    company.

He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin
and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the start
was not made as planned, most likely for want of means.

Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind to
work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by
money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident--whatever we
may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid
before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career.
One of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as
possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities.

As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel),
it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day in early
November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were
indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of
paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. Something about
it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill. He
had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be
having a pleasant dream.

The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His
need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome
conscience; in the end he advertised his find.

“I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that
the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn't
stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it.
I felt that I must take that money out of danger.”

In the “Turning-point” article he says: “I advertised the find and left
for the Amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a
literary discount.

As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for
the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the
wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the
unseen--who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a
journey, the end of which he little dreamed.




XXI. SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE

He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to
New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points),
but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a
far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew
his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had
expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary
idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a
Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary
airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was
the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of
his travels to the Post--for, a consideration. He may have had a still
larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have
been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five
dollars each--good payment for that time and place. The young traveler,
jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made
another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis
according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of
the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]

This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a
promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect
then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the
undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that
a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered
feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the
trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any,
will serve.

    I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto
    the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up
    into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,
    but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line
    was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to
    the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and
    shakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and
    “guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich
    books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use
    to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet
    quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't
    gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar
    she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin'
    --and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they
    got her off.

This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a
little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only
careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The
letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The
second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same
assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of
coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby
left on his hands.

From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them
hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the
second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are
the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first
for which he received a cash return.

He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of
Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter
in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable
association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general
interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain
views and philosophies which he never forgot.

He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace
people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling
Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly
unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on
the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent
his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then
Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in
Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.

Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and
scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these
and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never
talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired
his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a
mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the
same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of
toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He
would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out
that would betray Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened.

What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of
abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher
besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word
in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried
repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.

Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for
he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his
companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not
always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and
strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin
and Wallace gave out--their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet
Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even
further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a
few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator
in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an
ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the
scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that
man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the
only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the
only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man's
intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him
in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them
in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race.

They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened
to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark
Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their
impress upon him for life.




XXII. THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER

When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the
trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian
idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his
expedition. He had saved a little money--enough to take him to New
Orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey
down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that
indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of
his early dreams.

The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but
they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard.
“Spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy
condition which makes one willing to take his time.

Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he “ran away,”
 vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory.
This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely
died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head
when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so
conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to
Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the
gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was
to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four
marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that
followed them.

In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then
a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records
incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others.
He was, i

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