Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it keenly.  A gentleman’s son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land, he was entitled to a profession.  To him it was punishment, and the disgrace weighed upon him.  Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his dinner.  Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he should electrify the world with his eloquence.  He was surprised to find how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his trade.

Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put to school.  They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby, was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household.  Little Sam was the least promising of the flock.  He remained delicate, and developed little beyond a tendency to pranks.  He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched—­always in the direction of the river.  He walked in his sleep, too, and often the rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him fretting with cold in some dark corner.  The doctor was summoned for him oftener than was good for the family purse—­or for him, perhaps, if we may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days.

Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of ailments, and was ambitious for more.  An epidemic of measles—­the black, deadly kind—­was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint.  He yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed with the infection.  The success of this venture was complete.  Some days later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam’s bed to see him die.  According to his own after-confession, this gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene.  However, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh laurels.—­[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness.  With habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required.  Without doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very young.]—­He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort.

“You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” she said to him once, in her old age.

“I suppose you were afraid I wouldn’t live,” he suggested, in his tranquil fashion.

She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty years.  “No; afraid you would,” she said.  But that was only her joke, for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother’s care.