s on the walls.
Perhaps it was not the healthiest entertainment, but it was the kind to
cultivate an imagination that would one day produce "Tom Sawyer" and
"Huck Finn."

True, Little Sam was very young at this period, but even a little chap of
two or three would understand most of that fireside talk, and get
impressions more vivid than if the understanding were complete. He was
barely four when this earliest chapter of his life came to a close.

John Clemens had not remained satisfied with Florida and his undertakings
there. The town had not kept its promises. It failed to grow, and the
lock-and-dam scheme that would make Salt River navigable fell through.
Then one of the children, Margaret, a black-eyed, rosy little girl of
nine, suddenly died. This was in August, 1839. A month or two later the
saddened family abandoned their Florida home and moved in wagons, with
their household furnishings, to Hannibal, a Mississippi River town,
thirty miles away. There was only one girl left now, Pamela, twelve
years old, but there was another boy, baby Henry, three years younger
than Little Sam--four boys in all.

II.

THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM

Hannibal was a town with prospects and considerable trade. It was
slumbrous, being a slave town, but it was not dead. John Clemens
believed it a promising place for business, and opened a small general
store with Orion Clemens, now fifteen, a studious, dreamy lad, for clerk.

The little city was also an attractive place of residence. Mark Twain
remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer
morning, . . . the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi,
rolling its mile-wide tide along, .... the dense forest away on the
other side."

The "white town" was built against green hills, and abutting the river
were bluffs--Holliday's Hill and Lover's Leap. A distance below the town
was a cave--a wonderful cave, as every reader of Tom Sawyer knows--while
out in the river, toward the Illinois shore, was the delectable island
that was one day to be the meeting-place of Tom's pirate band, and later
to become the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim.

The river itself was full of interest. It was the highway to the outside
world. Rafts drifted by; smartly painted steamboats panted up and down,
touching to exchange traffic and travelers, a never-ceasing wonder to
those simple shut-in dwellers whom the telegraph and railway had not yet
reached.