setting most
of the type. A still younger brother, Henry, entered the office as an
apprentice. The Hannibal journal was no great paper from the beginning,
and it did not improve with time. Still, it managed to survive--country
papers nearly always manage to survive--year after year, bringing in
some sort of return. It was on this paper that young Sam Clemens
began his writings--burlesque, as a rule, of local characters and
conditions--usually published in his brother's absence; generally
resulting in trouble on his return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if
Orion had but realized his brother's talent he might have turned it into
capital even then.

In 1853 (he was not yet eighteen) Sam Clemens grew tired of his
limitations and pined for the wider horizon of the world. He gave out to
his family that he was going to St. Louis, but he kept on to New York,
where a World's Fair was then going on. In New York he found
employment at his trade, and during the hot months of 1853 worked in
a printing-office in Cliff Street. By and by he went to Philadelphia,
where he worked a brief time; made a trip to Washington, and presently
set out for the West again, after an absence of more than a year.

Onion, meanwhile, had established himself at Muscatine, Iowa, but soon
after removed to Keokuk, where the brothers were once more together,
till following their trade. Young Sam Clemens remained in Keokuk until
the winter of 1856-57, when he caught a touch of the South-American
fever then prevalent; and decided to go to Brazil. He left Keokuk for
Cincinnati, worked that winter in a printing-office there, and in April
took the little steamer, Paul Jones, for New Orleans, where he expected
to find a South-American vessel. In Life on the Mississippi we have his
story of how he met Horace Bixby and decided to become a pilot instead
of a South American adventurer--jauntily setting himself the stupendous
task of learning the twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi River
between St. Louis and New Orleans--of knowing it as exactly and as
unfailingly, even in the dark, as one knows the way to his own
features. It seems incredible to those who knew Mark Twain in his later
years--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details--that he could
have acquired so vast a store of minute facts as were required by that
task. Yet within eighteen months he had become not only a pilot, but one
of the best and most careful pilots on the river, intrusted with