ahead Sam spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse took a running leap over it.  There were splinters on the stump where the tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly.  Henry wanted to match the performance, but was afraid to try, so Sam dared him.  He kept daring him until Henry was goaded to the attempt.  He cleared the stump, but the highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and the cloth gave way.  He escaped injury, but the precious trousers were damaged almost beyond repair.  Sam, with a boy’s heartlessness, was fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at Henry’s appearance.

“Cotton-tail rabbit!” he shouted.  “Cotton-tail rabbit!” while Henry, weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road.  Let us hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the proper locality.

These two brothers were of widely different temperament.  Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable.  Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind.  Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster.  He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach.  Henry would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed and the room swept clean.

The home incidents in ‘Tom Sawyer’, most of them, really happened.  Sam Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did give Pain-killer to Peter, the cat.  There was a cholera scare that year, and Pain-killer was regarded as a preventive.  Sam had been ordered to take it liberally, and perhaps thought Peter too should be safeguarded.  As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves to the conditions.  In the introduction to Tom Sawyer Mark Twain confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its characters.  “Huck Finn was drawn from life,” he tells us.  “Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—­he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew.”

The three boys were—­himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree John Briggs and Will Bowen.  John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper in that book.  As for Huck Finn, his original was Tom Blankenship, neither elaborated nor qualified.

There were several of the Blankenships:  there was old Ben, the father, who had succeeded “General” Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the eldest son—­a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom—­that is to say, Huck—­who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer:  a ruin of rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and possessing that priceless