selected a place which,
though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a
steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade
already established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well
chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day.

He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.
He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder
overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was
ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason,
his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being
always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of
deliberate desertion.

"The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a
few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they
had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world
would have seen how I was treated and would have cried 'Shame!'"

This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously
confused with another, in Mark Twain's mind. In an autobiographical
chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to
Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded
family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but
later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an absent-minded
family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to
fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four,
behind. --[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain's memory
played him many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through
his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to
the actual occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but
occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author's
purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record
straight.]

VII. THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL. Hannibal in 1839 was already a
corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. It was a town
with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true
Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned,
though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at
least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be
less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and