Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post. Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe out of the country. No contributions of this time have been preserved. High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough. His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is likely to be. He was not especially precocious--not in literature. His literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[In Mark Twain's sketch “My First Literary Venture” he has set down with characteristic embroideries some account of this early authorship.]

Those were hard financial days. Orion could pay nothing on his mortgage--barely the interest. He had promised Sam three dollars and a half a week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes--“poor, shabby clothes,” he says in his record.

“My mother and sister did the housekeeping. My mother was cook. She used the provisions I supplied her. We therefore had a regular diet of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee.”

Mrs. Clemens again took a few boarders; Pamela, who had given up teaching for a time, organized another music class. Orion became despondent. One night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and ate up two composition rollers. Orion felt that fate was dealing with a heavy hand. Another disaster quickly followed. Fire broke out in the office, and the loss was considerable. An insurance company paid one hundred and fifty dollars. With it Orion replaced such articles as were absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room of the Clemens dwelling. He raised the one-story part of the building to give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along. It was the fire that furnished Sam Clemens with his Jim Wolfe sketch. In it he stated that Jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan.

In the meantime Pamela Clemens married. Her husband was a well-to-do merchant, William A. Moffett, formerly of Hannibal, but then of St. Louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial home.

Orion tried the experiment of a serial story. He wrote to a number of well-known authors in the East, but was unable to find one who would supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. Finally he obtained a translation of a French novel for the sum offered, which was five dollars. It did not save the sinking ship, however. He made the experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. He noticed that even his mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news. This was a final blow.

“I sat down in the dark,” he says, “the moon glinting in at the open door. I sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float.”

He had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to dispose of it on those terms. This was in 1853.

His brother Samuel was no longer with him. Several months before, in June, Sam decided he would go out into the world. He was in his eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he had grown restless in unrewarded service. Beyond his mastery of the trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. Once when he had asked Orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, Orion, exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated him for thinking of such extravagance. Soon afterward Sam confided to his mother that he was going away; that he believed Orion hated him; that there was no longer a place for him at home. He said he would go to St. Louis, where Pamela was. There would be work for him in St. Louis, and he could send money home. His intention was to go farther than St. Louis, but he dared not tell her. His mother put together sadly enough the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she held up a little Testament:

“I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam,” she said, “and make me a promise.”

If one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. Mother and son, they were of the same metal and the same mold.

“I want you to repeat after me, Sam, these words,” Jane Clemens said. “I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone.”

He repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him.

“Remember that, Sam, and write to us,” she said.

“And so,” Orion records, “he went wandering in search of that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to find where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. I not only missed his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment.”

XIX. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FRANKLIN

He went to St. Louis by the night boat, visited his sister Pamela, and found a job in the composing-room of the Evening News. He remained on the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world. The “world” was New York City, where the Crystal Palace Fair was then going on. The railway had been completed by this time, but he had not traveled on it. It had not many comforts; several days and nights were required for the New York trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful experience. He felt that even Pet McMurry could hardly have done anything to surpass it. He arrived in New York with two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat.

New York was a great and amazing city. It almost frightened him. It covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens boasted that one day it would cover it all. The World's Fair building, the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out. It was where Bryant Park is now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Young Clemens classed it as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. A portion of a letter to his sister Pamela has been preserved and is given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing specimen of his composition. The fragment concludes what was doubtless an exhaustive description.

From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags
of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering
jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and
fro 'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description.

The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot
enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 1
o'clock). It would take more than a week to examine everything on
exhibition; and I was only in a little over two hours to-night.
I only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a
poor memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal
objects. The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the
population of Hannibal. The price of admission being 50 cents, they
take in about $3,000.

The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace
--from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country
around. The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the
greatest wonder yet. Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the
Hudson River, and pass through the country to Westchester County,
where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New
York. From the reservoir in the city to the Westchester County
reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they
could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred
barrels of water per day!

I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go
to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as
Ma thinks he is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another
boy entirely. Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and
working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. I am used
to it now, though, and it is no trouble. Where is it Orion's going
to? Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my
health I will take her to Ky. in the spring--I shall save money for
this. Tell Jim (Wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give
me all the news....

(It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at 6, and am at work
at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings. Where would you suppose,
with a free printer's library containing more than 4,000 volumes
within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?
Write soon.

Truly your brother, SAM

P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not
read by it. Write, and let me know how Henry is.

It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality, and it gives us a scale of things. Double the population of Hannibal visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city came a distance of thirty-eight miles! Doubtless these were amazing statistics.

Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. He did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion's plans were then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new location. From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he had ever seen together before. We have somehow the feeling that he had all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was marked by a very definite line.

The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. He lodged at a mechanics' boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away.

He did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have “hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. On the whole, there was not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself with its wonders. He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853, and found it not easy to go. In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to have overlooked. Among other things he says:

I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the
fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and, secondly,
because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to
leave New York every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a
liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave
I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I
shall get off Tuesday, though.

Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the
Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The
play was the “Gladiator.” I did not like parts of it much, but
other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last
act, where the “Gladiator” (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in
all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul
seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling
to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play “Damon and Pythias”
--the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia
on Monday night.

I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a “Journal”
the other day, in which I see the office has been sold....

If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about
me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is
not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a
brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take
care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid,
however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall
be) as “independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.”...

Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the
Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than
that in the summer.

“I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York” is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty years later.

He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work “subbing” on a daily paper, 'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand at writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his contributions to the Philadelphia 'Ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary kind. Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print.

“My efforts were not received with approval,” was all he ever said of it afterward.

There were two or three characters in the 'Inquirer' office whom he did not forget. One of these was an old compositor who had “held a case” in that office for many years. His name was Frog, and sometimes when he went away the “office devils” would hang a line over his case, with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been in the beginning. Another old fellow there furnished amusement. He owned a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of fire. Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air:

“Doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in the northwestern part of the city?” or “There go the fire-bells again!” and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. It was not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens had his share in it.

He found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money there, for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. In a letter to Orion--whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October 26th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and “to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia.” Further along he adds:

Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people
in it. There is only one thing that gets my “dander” up--and that
is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me “it's no use to
get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work
here than you can do!” “Downhearted,” the devil! I have not had a
particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four
months ago. I fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me
downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and
am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants. When I was in Hannibal, before
I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have
convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from
home.

He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its inscription “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin,” and one is sharply reminded of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Clemens. Each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity.

The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the Fairmount stage. It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing; a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. The Wire Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in review. A fine residence about completed impressed him:

It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. The pillars
in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful,
ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at
the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front
windows.... To see some of them finished and standing, and
then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one,
in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise
the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble
is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia.

There is a flavor of the 'Innocents' about it; then a little further along:

I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--“For Wissahickon and
Manayunk 25 cents.” Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and
his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I
shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon....

There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always
expected to hand up a lady's money for her. Yesterday I sat in the
front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat
opposite me. She handed me her money, which was right. But, Lord!
a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so
familiar with a stranger. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front
end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her
fare.

There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th, to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th. Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a contributor, for the latter says:

I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my
letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work
dulls one's ideas amazingly.... I believe I am the only person in
the Inquirer office that does not drink. One young fellow makes $18
for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent
of it.

How do you like “free soil”?--I would like amazingly to see a good
old-fashioned negro. My love to all.

Truly your brother, SAM

In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick.

“I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,” is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of letters from home and those “not written as they should be.” “One only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “I don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all.”

He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a boy of his age, was due. The novelty of things had worn off; it was coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had no part in it. Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed:

“An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.”

He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year longer. In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital. His stay was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. He returned to Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American. Finally he went back to New York. There are no letters of this period. His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered. It was late in the summer of 1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West. His 'Wanderjahr' had lasted nearly fifteen months.

He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey. He was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother he was anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine. For a long time that missing day confused his calculations.

When he reached Orion's house the family sat at breakfast. He came in carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of him.

“You wouldn't let me buy a gun,” he said, “so I bought one myself, and I am going to use it, now, in self-defense.”

“You, Sam! You, Sam!” cried Jane Clemens. “Behave yourself,” for she was wary of a gun.

Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms.

XX. KEOKUK DAYS

Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office, but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money before he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or early spring of the following year.

He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli. Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends. Twenty-two years later Mark Twain exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time. Clemens wrote:

MY DEAR BURROUGH,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was
22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown
some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a
callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern
in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling
the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... That is
what I was at 19-20.

Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk. He had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. He tells it himself; he says:

At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage
for Muscatine. We halted for dinner at Burlington. After
despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove
up, ready for departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe
around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further
to do. A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, “Miss,
do you go by this stage?” I said, “Oh, I forgot!” and sprang out
and helped her in. A wife was a new kind of possession to which I
had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her.

Orion's wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens's girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk. Brother Sam came up from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The office at this time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street, in the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company. Henry Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad by the name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came in for social evenings. Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who clerked in the book-store on the ground floor.

These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher, Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken; seven years later Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the way.

Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said:

“I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it is yourself. You couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? Won't you please stop it? It bothers my pupils.”

Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise.

“Does it?” he said, very deliberately. “Why didn't you mention it before? To be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies.”

They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but joined one of the singing--classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular member of the singing-class.

They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a “fool”--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none. Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella Patterson (related through Orion's wife and generally known as “Ick”), and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were many more. He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late, sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of daytime use.

But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it would go out, and that would mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the bowl which stood on the floor. Young Brownell from below was passing upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam Clemens call. The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked his head in at the door.

“What will you have, Sam?” he asked.

“Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I am in trouble. I want somebody to light my pipe.”

“Why don't you get up and light it yourself?” Brownell asked.

“I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me.”

Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it.

“What are you reading, Sam?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days I'll write a funnier book than that, myself.”

Brownell laughed.

“No, you won't, Sam,” he said. “You are too lazy ever to write a book.”

A good many years later when the name “Mark Twain” had begun to stand for American humor the owner of it gave his “Sandwich Island” lecture in Keokuk. Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: “The king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth, except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in the city of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell.”

The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain's life was neither very long nor very actively important. It extended over a period of less than two years--two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known--but they were not years of startling occurrence.

Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its humor of a primitive kind. Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. He had entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no rival. They impressed him into a debating society after that, and there was generally a stir of attention when Sam Clemens was about to take the floor.

Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German apprentice music.

“There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song beginning:

“Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine,
Turkey came along and yanked him from behind.”

The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. Without intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor's hand was caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel. Sam called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the scars remained.

Orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his brother's wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water.

The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough. His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion himself tells how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk directory, but it did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as “an antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost.

Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856.

I don't like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry
and Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory,
--[Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probably
the second one.]--I could tell before breakfast just how much work
could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they
throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their
work.... I am not getting along well with the job-work. I can't
work blindly--without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I
calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on the
press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he
was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this
morning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job-
work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind...

The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon's account of the exploration was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their achievement. In the “Turning-point” article already mentioned he refers to this. He says:

That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament
has not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and many
a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but
these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing
commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward.
Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, even
deaf persons can hear me think.

In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full confidence.

Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from
Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St.
Louis and went to New York--I can start for New York and go to South
America.

He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. He fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various influences to bear.

I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with
South American books: They have Herndon's report now. Ward and the
Dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the
office. We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our
company.

He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means.

Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident--whatever we may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. One of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities.

As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day in early November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. Something about it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill. He had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be having a pleasant dream.

The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome conscience; in the end he advertised his find.

“I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn't stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. I felt that I must take that money out of danger.”

In the “Turning-point” article he says: “I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a literary discount.

As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the unseen--who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed.

XXI. SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE

He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the Post--for, a consideration. He may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each--good payment for that time and place. The young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]

This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve.

I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto
the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up
into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,
but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line
was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to
the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and
shakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and
“guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich
books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use
to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet
quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't
gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar
she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin'
--and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they
got her off.

This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on his hands.

From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return.

He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot.

He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.

Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened.

What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.

Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin and Wallace gave out--their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race.

They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their impress upon him for life.

XXII. THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER

When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition. He had saved a little money--enough to take him to New Orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of his early dreams.

The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard. “Spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time.

Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he “ran away,” vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them.

In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others. He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old “permanent ambition” of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint.

Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still living (1910) and at the wheel,--[The writer of this memoir interviewed Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say:

“Good morning.”

Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, briskly, without looking around.

As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This one presently came up and stood a little behind him.

“How would you like a young man to learn the river?” he said.

The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair.

“I wouldn't like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. A great deal more trouble than profit.”

The applicant was not discouraged.

“I am a printer by trade,” he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. “It doesn't agree with me. I thought I'd go to South America.”

Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his voice.

“What makes you pull your words that way?” (“pulling” being the river term for drawling), he asked.

The young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench.

“You'll have to ask my mother,” he said, more slowly than ever. “She pulls hers, too.”

Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the manner of the reply amused him. His guest made another advance.

“Do you know the Bowen boys?” he asked--“pilots in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade?”

“I know them well--all three of them. William Bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. I know Sam, too, and Bart.”

“Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will especially were my chums.”

“Come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “What is your name?”

The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water.

“Do you drink?”

“No.”

“Do you gamble?”

“No, Sir.”

“Do you swear?”

“Not for amusement; only under pressure.”

“Do you chew?”

“No, sir, never; but I must smoke.”

“Did you ever do any steering?” was Bixby's next question.

“I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.”

“Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag.”

Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said: