where a World's Fair was then going on. In New York he found employment
at his trade, and during the hot months of 1853 worked in a
printing-office in Cliff Street. By and by he went to Philadelphia,
where he worked a brief time; made a trip to Washington, and presently
set out for the West again, after an absence of more than a year.

Onion, meanwhile, had established himself at Muscatine, Iowa, but soon
after removed to Keokuk, where the brothers were once more together,
till following their trade. Young Sam Clemens remained in Keokuk until
the winter of 1856-57, when he caught a touch of the South-American fever
then prevalent; and decided to go to Brazil. He left Keokuk for
Cincinnati, worked that winter in a printing-office there, and in April
took the little steamer, Paul Jones, for New Orleans, where he expected
to find a South-American vessel. In Life on the Mississippi we have his
story of how he met Horace Bixby and decided to become a pilot instead of
a South American adventurer--jauntily setting himself the stupendous task
of learning the twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi River between St.
Louis and New Orleans--of knowing it as exactly and as unfailingly, even
in the dark, as one knows the way to his own features. It seems
incredible to those who knew Mark Twain in his later years--dreamy,
unpractical, and indifferent to details--that he could have acquired so
vast a store of minute facts as were required by that task. Yet within
eighteen months he had become not only a pilot, but one of the best and
most careful pilots on the river, intrusted with some of the largest and
most valuable steamers. He continued in that profession for two and a
half years longer, and during that time met with no disaster that cost
his owners a single dollar for damage.

Then the war broke out. South Carolina seceded in December, 1860 and
other States followed. Clemens was in New Orleans in January, 1861, when