gave him an unusual distinction. Long afterward he would become Nigger
Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his gentle
guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men.

Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle
John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. It was
a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in)
connecting the two divisions. In the summer the table was set in the
middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served in
the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that left
only room for rows of plates around the edge. Fried chicken, roast pig,
turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits,
partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be
served here. If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and
in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. His mother kept him
there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather
around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote of that
scene:

I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its
buildings, 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