There were several of the Blankenships: there was old Ben, the father,
who had succeeded "General" Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the
eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to
say, Huck--who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer: a ruin of rags,
a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and
possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to
any living soul. He could came and go as he chose; he never had to work
or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the other boys
longed to do and were forbidden. He represented to them the very
embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important matters,
such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and spells
and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a companion.
The fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly added charm.

The Blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and
lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later
moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on
Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle
even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still
standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which
must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben
Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off
as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom--a fame founded on
irresponsibility and inconsequence. Orion Clemens, who was concerned
with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the
Blankenships spiritually. Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to
his heart. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and
Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back
single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the
group of boon companions which, besides Tom, included John Briggs, the