The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank of the river.  He no longer practised law.  In The Gilded Age we have Mark Twain’s picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother Orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time.  The chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here.  The reader may look it up for himself, if he chooses.  If he does he will not wonder that Jane Clemens’s handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his environment —­was rapidly getting out of heart.  After all the bright promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed dwindling away.

A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than his years.  Every spring he was prostrated with what was called “sunpain,” an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all persistent effort.  Yet he did not retreat from his moral and intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community.  He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten.  Gray and deep-set under bushy brows, they literally looked you through.  Absolutely fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights.  It is told of John Clemens, at Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit, according to the custom of that community.  For some reason, the minister put the document aside and neglected it.  At the close of the service Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to the congregation.  Those who knew Mark Twain best will not fail to recall in him certain of his father’s legacies.

The arrival of a letter from “Colonel Sellers” inviting the Hawkins family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age.  In reality the letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens’s sister, Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri.  It was a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory is likely to last as long as American history.

III

A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE