He did not delay matters.  When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.  He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was ready to set out for the new home.  Orion records that, for some reason, his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of deliberate desertion.

“The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache.  The wagon had gone a few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter.  How I wished they had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal.  Then the world would have seen how I was treated and would have cried ‘Shame!’”

This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously confused with another, in Mark Twain’s mind.  In an autobiographical chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded family.  The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but later, and somewhat differently.  It would indeed be an absent-minded family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four, behind.

—­[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain’s memory played him many tricks in later life.  Incidents were filtered through his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual occurrence.  Some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice.  It is the author’s purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.]

VII

THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL

Hannibal in 1839 was already a corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own.  It was a town with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned, though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at least, of manufacturing.  It was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep—­that is to say, dead—­and it was tranquilly content.  Mark Twain remembered it as “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,. . . the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along; . . . the dense forest away on the other side.”

The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so:  circled with bluffs, with Holliday’s Hill on the north, Lover’s Leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the way of setting.