nibal "a loafing,
out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town"; and
the elder Clemens was himself a slave-owner, who silently abhorred
slavery.

When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had
to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little
and of book-learning still less; but life itself is not a bad teacher
for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his
chances. He spent three years in the printing office of the little local
paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that
stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his
connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the
lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York.

When he was seventeen he went back to the home of his boyhood resolved
to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learnt the river he has
told us in 'Life on the Mississippi,' wherein his adventures, his
experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub-pilot are recorded
with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes
the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of
autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement
and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during
the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in
the pages of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' But toward the
end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy
as a carrier; and in the beginning of the sixties the Civil War broke
out and the Mississippi no longer went unvext to the sea. The skill,
slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at
twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a
border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union
and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting,
not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of
his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When
this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the northwest with his
brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada. Thus the
man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone
East as a jour printer, who had been again and again up and down the
Mississippi, now went West w