The Boys Life of Mark Twain | Page 6

the lock-and-dam scheme that would make Salt River
navigable fell through. Then one of the children, Margaret, a
black-eyed, rosy little girl of nine, suddenly died. This was in August,
1839. A month or two later the saddened family abandoned their
Florida home and moved in wagons, with their household furnishings,
to Hannibal, a Mississippi River town, thirty miles away. There was
only one girl left now, Pamela, twelve years old, but there was another
boy, baby Henry, three years younger than Little Sam--four boys in all.

II.
THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM
Hannibal was a town with prospects and considerable trade. It was
slumbrous, being a slave town, but it was not dead. John Clemens
believed it a promising place for business, and opened a small general
store with Orion Clemens, now fifteen, a studious, dreamy lad, for
clerk.
The little city was also an attractive place of residence. 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 "white town" was built against green hills, and abutting the river
were bluffs--Holliday's Hill and Lover's Leap. A distance below the
town was a cave--a wonderful cave, as every reader of Tom Sawyer
knows--while out in the river, toward the Illinois shore, was the
delectable island that was one day to be the meeting-place of Tom's
pirate band, and later to become the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger
Jim.
The river itself was full of interest. It was the highway to the outside
world. Rafts drifted by; smartly painted steamboats panted up and

down, touching to exchange traffic and travelers, a never-ceasing
wonder to those simple shut-in dwellers whom the telegraph and
railway had not yet reached. That Hannibal was a pleasant place of
residence we may believe, and what an attractive place for a boy to
grow up in!
Little Sam, however, was not yet ready to enjoy the island and the cave.
He was still delicate--the least promising of the family. He was queer
and fanciful, and rather silent. He walked in his sleep and was often
found in the middle of the night, fretting with the cold, in some dark
corner. Once he heard that a neighbor's children had the measles, and,
being very anxious to catch the complaint, slipped over to the house
and crept into bed with an infected playmate. Some days later, Little
Sam's relatives gathered about his bed to see him die. He confessed,
long after, that the scene gratified him. However, he survived, and fell
into the habit of running away, usually in the direction of the river.
"You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," his mother once
said to him, in her old age.
"I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live," he suggested.
She looked at him with the keen humor which had been her legacy to
him. "No, afraid you would," she said. Which was only her joke, for
she had the tenderest of hearts, and, like all mothers, had a weakness
for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. It was chiefly on
his account that she returned each year to Florida to spend the summer
on John Quarles's farm.
If Uncle John Quarles's farm was just an ordinary Missouri farm, and
his slaves just average negroes, they certainly never seemed so to Little
Sam. There was a kind of glory about everything that belonged to
Uncle John, and it was not all imagination, for some of the spirit of that
jovial, kindly hearted man could hardly fail to radiate from his
belongings.
The farm was a large one for that locality, and the farm-house was a big
double log building--that is, two buildings with a roofed-over passage

between, where in summer the lavish Southern meals were served,
brought in on huge dishes by the negroes, and left for each one to help
himself. Fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just
killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens, green
corn, watermelon--a little boy who did not die on that bill of fare would
be likely to get well on it, and to Little Sam the farm proved a
life-saver.
It was, in fact, a heavenly place for a little boy. In the corner of the yard
there were hickory and black-walnut trees, and just over the fence the
hill sloped past barns and cribs to a brook, a rare place to wade, though
there were forbidden pools. Cousin Tabitha Quarles, called "Puss," his
own age, was Little Sam's playmate, and a slave girl, Mary, who, being
six years older, was supposed to keep them out of mischief. There were
swings