Through that far-off, warm, golden summer-time Little Sam romped and
dreamed and grew. He would return each summer to the farm during those
early years. It would become a beautiful memory. His mother generally
kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them
gather 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