ve done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at
Florida, Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months
after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he
stated that he had increased by one per cent. the population of this
village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man
in history had ever done for any other town.

Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life,
and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different
times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the
rescue. He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she
hadn't been uneasy about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about
him the whole time. But when he inquired further if she was afraid he
would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking
out the facts--that she had been afraid he would!

His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his
writings.

In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a
lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to
Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all
the dignity of a local autocrat. His forum was a "dingy" office,
furnished with "a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a
puncheon bench." The solemnity of his manner in administering the law
won for him, among his neighbours, the title of Judge.

One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to
realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
"Sam was always a good-hearted boy," his mother once remarked, "but he
was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could
never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me
dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much
in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and
sober-minded as they were." At school, he "excelled only in spelling";
outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn,
mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity
afforded. "Often his father would start him off to school," his mother
once said, "and in a lit