the collar, but, as the thunder got louder, Sam decided that he loved
Sunday-school and would go the next Sunday without being invited.

Sam's days were not all disturbed by fierce events. They were mostly
filled with pleasanter things. There were picnics sometimes, and
ferryboat excursions, and any day one could roam the woods, or fish,
alone or in company. The hills and woods around Hannibal were never
disappointing. There was the cave with its marvels. There was Bear
Creek, where he had learned to swim. He had seen two playmates drown;
twice, himself, he had been dragged ashore, more dead than alive; once by
a slave girl, another time by a slave man--Neal Champ, of the Pavey
Hotel. But he had persevered, and with success. He could swim better
than any playmate of his age.

It was the river that he cared for most. It was the pathway that led to
the great world outside. He would sit by it for hours and dream. He
would venture out on it in a quietly borrowed boat, when he was barely
strong enough to lift an oar. He learned to know all its moods and
phases.

More than anything in the world he hungered to make a trip on one of the
big, smart steamers that were always passing. "You can hardly imagine
what it meant," he reflected, once, "to a boy in those days, shut in as
we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never take a trip
on them."

It was at the mature age of nine that he found he could endure this no
longer. One day when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal,
he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.
Then the signal-bells rang, the steamer backed away and swung into