around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote:

"I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all
its belongings, all its details; the family-room of the house, with
the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another--a
wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the
mournfulest of all sounds to me and made me homesick and low-
spirited and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the
dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs from whose
ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we
scraped it off and ate it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the
rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs,
blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner, and my uncle in the other,
smoking his corn-cob pipe."

It is hard not to tell more of the farm, for the boy who was one day
going to write of Tom and Huck and the rest learned there so many things
that Tom and Huck would need to know.

But he must have "book-learning," too, Jane Clemens said. On his return
to Hannibal that first summer, she decided that Little Sam was ready for
school. He was five years old and regarded as a "stirring child."

"He drives me crazy with his didoes when he's in the house," his mother
declared, "and when he's out of it I'm expecting every minute that some
one will bring him home half dead."

Mark Twain used to say that he had had nine narrow escapes from drowning,
and it was at this early age that he was brought home one afternoon in a
limp state, having been pulled from a deep hole in Bear Creek by a slave
girl.

When he was restored, his mother said: "I guess there wasn't much danger.
People born to be hanged are safe in water."

Mark Twain's mother was the original of Aunt Polly in the story of Tom
Sawyer, an outspoken, keen-witted, charitable woman, whom it was good to
know. She had a heart full of pity, especially for dumb creatures. She
refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. She
would drown young kittens when necessary, but warmed the water for the
purpose. She could be strict, however, with her children, if occasion
required, and recognized their faults.

Little Sam was inclined to elaborate largely on fact. A neighbor once
said to her: "You don't believe anything that child says, I hope."

"Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest
is pure g