“Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-water. You got to go all by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there’s a spunk-water stump, and just as it’s midnight you back up against the stump and jam your hand in it and say:

and then walk away quick eleven steps, with your eyes shut and then turn round three times and walk home without speaking to anybody. Because if you do speak, the charm’s busted.

“I’ve took off thousands of warts that way, Huck. I play with frogs so much that I’ve always got considerable warts. Sometimes I take ’em off with a bean.”

“Yes, a bean’s good. I’ve done that.”

“But say, Huck, how do you cure ’em with dead cats?”

By this time, doubtless you are saying, “Oh, I know from what book you are quoting. I have Tom Sawyer at home and Huckleberry Finn, too. I read them over and over.”

But would you not like to know something about the man, who could write so understandingly of boys? Suppose we read the story of his life and see if we can decide what gave him his wide knowledge of games and adventures, of boyish larks and youthful troubles.

We must go for his earliest experiences to a town on the Mississippi, one hundred miles from St. Louis. In the year 1839, the Clemens family moved to Hannibal from a still smaller town in Missouri, named Florida. The youngest child in the Clemens family was four years old. He was named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. For eight years this boy roved over the hills and through the woods with his playmates. There was a cave near Hannibal. Many strange creatures were said to hide in its depths. Also, there was Bear Creek where the boys went swimming. Young Sam tried hard to learn to swim. Several times he was dragged ashore just in time to save his life, but at last he learned to swim better than any of his friends.

Then there was the river, the broad Mississippi.

“It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm was permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world. The river with its islands, its great slow moving rafts, its marvelous steamboats that were like fairyland, and its stately current going to the sea. How it held him! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat, when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar out of the water.”

We are told that when Sam Clemens was only nine years of age he managed to board one of the river steamers. He hid under a boat on the upper deck. After the steamer started he sat watching the shore slip past. Then came a heavy rain and a wet, shivering, little boy was 215 found by one of the crew. At the next stop he was put ashore and relatives, who lived there, took him home, and so ended his first journey upon the river.

Years later he became a pilot on a Mississippi river boat and made many trips from New Orleans up the river and back. Such a trip required thirty-five days.

While acting as a river pilot, Samuel Clemens heard the name, “Mark Twain.” An old riverman had used it as an assumed name, taking the term from the cry of the boatmen as they tested the depth of the river. Samuel Clemens had an intense love of joking and fun, so when he first began to write, he suddenly thought it would be amusing to sign some name other than his own. Therefore, he signed his articles “Mark Twain.” This name clung to him, and many persons forgot or never knew that his real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Accordingly, in the river of his boyhood love, he found the name by which the world knows today one of the foremost American authors. Yet, in those early days in Hannibal, he had no idea of writing. Indeed, his days were so busy it is not likely he thought much of the future at all. He was the leader of a band of boys that played Bandit, Pirate and Indian. Sam Clemens was always chief. He led the way to the caves whose chambers reached far back under the cliffs and even, perhaps, under the river itself.

When he was a man, Mr. Clemens wrote two books telling of these early days in Hannibal. “The Adventures 216 of Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” “Tom Sawyer” was himself, and the incidents in the book all had their foundation in the days of his boyhood. The cave, as you may know, plays an important part in the latter story. In “Tom Sawyer,” Indian Joe dies in the cave. There was an Indian Joe in Hannibal and while he did not die in the cave, he was lost there for days and was living on bats when found. This incident made a strong impression on young Samuel Clemens and he never forgot it. It was in the Clemen’s house that Tom gave the cat pain-killer; there, too, that he induced a crowd of boys to white-wash the fence all one Saturday morning. It was at the Clemens’ home, too, that a small boy in his night clothes came tumbling down from an over-hung trellis upon the merry crowd cooling taffy in the snow.

Such happenings were part of young Sam’s life. He lived the out-of-doors and, when grown to manhood, he could recall all the sports and pleasures of those days. He cherished the memory of his boyhood friends and so wrote of “Huck” Finn, making him like Tom Blakenship, one of the riotous, freedom-loving members of Sam Clemens’ band.

These boys crowded many adventures into a few years. Hannibal was the scene of stormy times. Black slaves were sold in the open market. Desperadoes roamed the streets. Lawlessness was everywhere and it was not strange that the residents of Hannibal did not think Sam Clemens amounted to much and prophesied that he would 217 never grow up to follow a respectable calling.

Yet when his father died, Sam went to work in his brother’s printing shop. Printed matter began to interest him. Then one day, in the dusty street of Hannibal, this half-grown, lively boy picked up a scrap of paper. A leaf torn from a history! Where did it come from? No one knows.

Books were not plentiful then in that little town. Yet, on this paper the fun-loving Sam Clemens read for the first time of Joan of Arc, the wondrous maid who led the French to victory. He had never heard of her. He had read no history, nor had he had an active interest in books. Studying there in the village street, reading the few lines of the marvelous story of the Maid of Orleans, there was created in him an interest that went with him throughout life.

He was by turn a printer, a pilot, a pioneer, a soldier, a miner, a newspaper reporter, a lecturer, but at last he found his true place. He became a writer and wrote books that continue to delight thousands upon thousands of readers. His life went into his books. Just as he drew upon his early days in Hannibal for the material in “Huckleberry Finn” and The “Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” so he used all of his experiences. He wrote “Life Upon The Mississippi,” a record of his days as a pilot; “Roughing It,” a story of a mining camp; “The Jumping Frog,” a western story that made his fame throughout the United States; “Innocents Abroad,” a 218 tale of his experiences abroad, and “The Life Of Joan Of Arc,” a beautiful story that was always the author’s favorite.

During the last years of his life, Mark Twain passed the winters in Bermuda and there he was, as ever, the friend of children. There was a pretty, little girl at his hotel named Margaret, who was twelve years old. She and Mr. Clemens went everywhere together and, on one excursion, he found a beautiful, little shell. The two halves came apart in his hand. He gave one of them to Margaret and said, “Now dear, sometime or other in the future, I shall run across you somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be some girl that only resembles you. I shall be saying to myself, ‘I know that this is Margaret by the look of her, but I don’t know for sure whether this is my Margaret or somebody else’s;’ but, no matter, I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of my packet and say, ‘I think you are my Margaret, but I am not certain; if you are my Margaret you can produce the other half of the shell.’”

After that Margaret played the new game often and she tried to catch him without his half of the shell, but Mark Twain writes, “I always defeated that game, wherefore, she came to recognize, at last, that I was not only old, but very smart.”

Mark Twain had lived 74 years when the close of his life here came April 20, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut. Once he wrote in one of his humorous moments, “Let us 219 endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” When his life here ended, tributes were received from every land. He was mourned as few men have ever been. Why? Because he knew people; he loved them and interested them. Because, in his most famous days he still remained at heart the boy who played beside the river and loved the surging, restless flow of the mighty current.