all lands, and mourned by them when he died. It is the story of one of
the world's very great men--the story of Mark Twain.




I.

THE FAMILY OF JOHN CLEMENS

A long time ago, back in the early years of another century, a family
named Clemens moved from eastern Tennessee to eastern Missouri--from a
small, unheard-of place called Pall Mall, on Wolf River, to an equally
small and unknown place called Florida, on a tiny river named the Salt.

That was a far journey, in those days, for railway trains in 1835 had not
reached the South and West, and John Clemens and his family traveled in
an old two-horse barouche, with two extra riding-horses, on one of which
rode the eldest child, Orion Clemens, a boy of ten, and on the other
Jennie, a slave girl.

In the carriage with the parents were three other children--Pamela and
Margaret, aged eight and five, and little Benjamin, three years old. The
time was spring, the period of the Old South, and, while these youngsters
did not realize that they were passing through a sort of Golden Age, they
must have enjoyed the weeks of leisurely journeying toward what was then
the Far West--the Promised Land.

The Clemens fortunes had been poor in Tennessee. John Marshall Clemens,
the father, was a lawyer, a man of education; but he was a dreamer, too,