SAM.

Readers familiar with the life of Mark Twain know that none of the
would-be adventurers found their way to the Amazon: His two
associates gave up the plan, probably for lack of means. Young
Clemens himself found a fifty-dollar bill one bleak November day
blowing along the streets of Keokuk, and after duly advertising his
find without result, set out for the Amazon, by way of Cincinnati
and New Orleans.

"I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day," he
once declared, a statement which we may take with a literary
discount.

He remained in Cincinnati that winter (1856-57) working at his
trade. No letters have been preserved from that time, except two
that were sent to a Keokuk weekly, the Saturday Post, and as these
were written for publication, and are rather a poor attempt at
burlesque humor--their chief feature being a pretended illiteracy
--they would seem to bear no relation to this collection. He roomed
that winter with a rugged, self-educated Scotchman--a mechanic, but
a man of books and philosophies, who left an impress on Mark Twain's
mental life.

In April he took up once more the journey toward South America, but
presently forgot the Amazon altogether in the new career that opened
to him. All through his boyhood and youth Samuel Clemens had wanted
to be a pilot. Now came the long-deferred opportunity. On the
little Cincinnati steamer, the Paul Jones, there was a pilot named
Horace Bixby. Young Clemens idling in the pilot-house was one
morning seized with the old ambition, and laid siege to Bixby to
teach him the river. The terms finally agreed upon specified a fee
to Bixby of five hundred dollars, one hundred down, the balance when
the pupil had completed the course and was earning money. But all
this has been told in full elsewhere, and is only summarized here
because the letters fail to complete the story.

Bixby soon made some trips up the Missouri River, and in his absence
turned his apprentice, or "cub," over to other pilots, such being
the river custom. Young Clemens, in love with the life, and a
favorite with his superiors, had a happy time until he came under a
pilot named Brown. Brown was illiterate and tyrannical, and from
the beginning of their association pilot and apprenti