mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity
afforded. "Often his father would start him off to school," his mother
once said, "and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his
whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and
Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past
would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight.
Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to
teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn. But I never
gave up. He was always a great boy for history, and could never get
tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn't any use for schoolhouses
and text books."

Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a "loafing, out-at-elbows,
down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town." Young Clemens
accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his
father was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in
part of two or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like
so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his
children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however,
a stern taskmaster. Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and
his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality. If at times this
neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the
suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them
--his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to
be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But this modest
estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off
a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco,
and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he
pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every
original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to