most on the moment of arrival in the
new land, John Clemens once more found himself established in trade.

The next thing was to find a home. There were twenty-one houses in
Florida, and none of them large. The one selected by John and Jane
Clemens had two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen--a small place and
lowly--the kind of a place that so often has seen the beginning of
exalted lives. Christianity began with a babe in a manger; Shakespeare
first saw the light in a cottage at Stratford; Lincoln entered the world
by way of a leaky cabin in Kentucky, and into the narrow limits of the
Clemens home in Florida, on a bleak autumn day--November 30, 1835--there
was born one who under the name of Mark Twain would live to cheer and
comfort a tired world.

The name Mark Twain had not been thought of then, and probably no one
prophesied favorably for the new-comer, who was small and feeble, and not
over-welcome in that crowded household. They named him Samuel, after his
paternal grandfather, and added Langhorne for an old friend--a goodly
burden for so frail a wayfarer. But more appropriately they called him
"Little Sam," or "Sammy," which clung to him through the years of his
delicate childhood.

It seems a curious childhood, as we think of it now. Missouri was a
slave State--Little Sam's companions were as often black as white. All
the children of that time and locality had negroes for playmates, and
were cared for by them. They were fond of their black companions and
would have felt lost without them. The negro children knew all the best
ways of doing things--how to work charms and spells, the best way to cure
warts and heal stone-bruises, and to make it rain, and to find lost
money. They knew what signs meant, and dreams, and how to keep off
hoodoo; and all negroes, old and young, knew any number of weird tales.

John Clemens must have prospered during the early years of his Florida
residence, for he added another slave to his household--Uncle Ned, a man
of all work--and he built a somewhat larger house, in one room of which,
the kitchen, was a big fireplace. There was a wide hearth and always
plenty of wood, and here after supper the children would gather, with
Jennie and Uncle Ned, and the latter would tell hair-lifting tales of
"ha'nts," and lonely roads, and witch-work that would make his hearers
shiver with terror and delight, and look furtively over their shoulders
toward the dark window-panes and the hovering shadow