from the book
by me it was only suffering the fate originally intended for it.

_From Susy's Biography._

Papa was born in Missouri. His mother is Grandma Clemens (Jane
Lampton Clemens) of Kentucky. Grandpa Clemens was of the F.F.V's of
Virginia.

Without doubt it was I that gave Susy that impression. I cannot imagine
why, because I was never in my life much impressed by grandeurs which
proceed from the accident of birth. I did not get this indifference from
my mother. She was always strongly interested in the ancestry of the
house. She traced her own line back to the Lambtons of Durham,
England--a family which had been occupying broad lands there since Saxon
times. I am not sure, but I think that those Lambtons got along without
titles of nobility for eight or nine hundred years, then produced a
great man, three-quarters of a century ago, and broke into the peerage.
My mother knew all about the Clemenses of Virginia, and loved to
aggrandize them to me, but she has long been dead. There has been no one
to keep those details fresh in my memory, and they have grown dim.

There was a Jere. Clemens who was a United States Senator, and in his
day enjoyed the usual Senatorial fame--a fame which perishes whether it
spring from four years' service or forty. After Jere. Clemens's fame as
a Senator passed away, he was still remembered for many years on account
of another service which he performed. He shot old John Brown's Governor
Wise in the hind leg in a duel. However, I am not very clear about this.
It may be that Governor Wise shot _him_ in the hind leg. However, I
don't think it is important. I think that the only thing that is really
important is that one of them got shot in the hind leg. It would have
been better and nobler and more historical and satisfactory if both of
them had got shot in the hind leg--but it is of no use for me to try to
recollect history. I never had a historical mind. Let it go. Whichever
way it happened I am glad of it, and that is as much enthusiasm as I can
get up for a person bearing my name. But I am forgetting the first
Clemens--the one that stands furthest back toward the really original
_first_ Clemens, which was Adam.

_From Susy's Biography._

Clara and I are sure that papa played the trick on Grandma, about
the whipping, that is related in "The Adventures of Tom Sayer":
"Hand me that switch." The switch hovered in the air, the peril was
desp