The Boys Life of Mark Twain | Page 7

in the big, shady pasture, where Mary swung her charges and
ran under them until their feet touched the branches. All the woods
were full of squirrels and birds and blooming flowers; all the meadows
were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing
grasshoppers and calling larks; the fence-rows were full of wild
blackberries; there were apples and peaches in the orchard, and plenty
of melons ripening in the corn. Certainly it was a glorious place!
Little Sam got into trouble once with the watermelons. One of them
had not ripened quite enough when he ate several slices of it. Very soon
after he was seized with such terrible cramps that some of the
household did not think he could live.
But his mother said: "Sammy will pull through. He was not born to die
that way." Which was a true prophecy. Sammy's slender constitution
withstood the strain. It was similarly tested more than once during
those early years. He was regarded as a curious child. At times dreamy
and silent, again wild-headed and noisy, with sudden impulses that sent
him capering and swinging his arms into the wind until he would fall
with shrieks and spasms of laughter and madly roll over and over in the
grass. It is not remembered that any one prophesied very well for his
future at such times.
The negro quarters on Uncle John's farm were especially fascinating. In

one cabin lived a bedridden old woman whom the children looked upon
with awe. She was said to be a thousand years old, and to have talked
with Moses. She had lost her health in the desert, coming out of Egypt.
She had seen Pharaoh drown, and the fright had caused the bald spot on
her head. She could ward off witches and dissolve spells.
Uncle Dan'l was another favorite, a kind-hearted, gentle soul, who long
after, as Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales,
would win world-wide love and sympathy.
Through that far-off, warm, golden summer-time Little Sam romped
and dreamed and grew. He would return each summer to the farm
during those early years. It would become a beautiful memory. His
mother generally kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly
evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty
years later he wrote:
"I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its
belongings, 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."
It is hard not to tell more of the farm, for the boy who was one day
going to write of Tom and Huck and the rest learned there so many
things that Tom and Huck would need to know.
But he must have "book-learning," too, Jane Clemens said. On his
return to Hannibal that first summer, she decided that Little Sam was
ready for school. He was five years old and regarded as a "stirring
child."

"He drives me crazy with his didoes when he's in the house," his
mother declared, "and when he's out of it I'm expecting every minute
that some one will bring him home half dead."
Mark Twain used to say that he had had nine narrow escapes from
drowning, and it was at this early age that he was brought home one
afternoon in a limp state, having been pulled from a deep hole in Bear
Creek by a slave girl.
When he was restored, his mother said: "I guess there wasn't much
danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water."
Mark Twain's mother was the original of Aunt Polly in the story of
Tom Sawyer, an outspoken, keen-witted, charitable woman, whom it
was good to know. She had a heart full of pity, especially for dumb
creatures. She refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for
catching mice. She would drown young kittens when necessary, but
warmed the water for the purpose. She could be strict, however, with
her children, if occasion required, and recognized their faults.
Little Sam was inclined to elaborate largely on fact. A neighbor once
said to her: "You don't believe anything that