He was always a tender-hearted lad.  He would never abuse an animal, unless, as in the Pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran away with him.  He had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket.  When he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table.  His sympathy included inanimate things as well.  He loved flowers—­not as the embryo botanist or gardener, but as a personal friend.  He pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of November because their brief lives were ended, and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another spring.  His heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit meadow and the drifted hill.  That his observation of all nature was minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was never the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious observation of sympathetic love.

We are wandering away from his school-days.  They were brief enough and came rapidly to an end.  They will not hold us long.  Undoubtedly Tom Sawyer’s distaste for school and his excuses for staying at home—­usually some pretended illness—­have ample foundation in the boyhood of Sam Clemens.  His mother punished him and pleaded with him, alternately.  He detested school as he detested nothing else on earth, even going to church.  “Church ain’t worth shucks,” said Tom Sawyer, but it was better than school.

As already noted, the school of Mr. Cross stood in or near what is now the Square in Hannibal.  The Square was only a grove then, grown up with plum, hazel, and vine—­a rare place for children.  At recess and the noon hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in grape-vine swings.  There was a spelling-bee every Friday afternoon, for Sam the only endurable event of the school exercises.  He could hold the floor at spelling longer than Buck Brown.  This was spectacular and showy; it invited compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name must have been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well.  One day Sam Clemens wrote on his slate: 

       Cross by name and cross by nature
       Cross jumped over an Irish potato.

He showed this to John Briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius.  He urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet’s ambition did not go so far.

“Oh, pshaw!” said John.  “I wouldn’t be afraid to do it.

“I dare you to do it,” said Sam.

John Briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when Mr. Cross was at home at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet.  When the teacher returned and “books” were called he looked steadily at John Briggs.  He had recognized the penmanship.

“Did you do that?” he asked, ominously.

It was a time for truth.

“Yes, sir,” said John.

“Come here!” And John came, and paid for his exploitation of genius heavily.  Sam Clemens expected that the next call would be for “author,” but for some reason the investigation ended there.  It was unusual for him to escape.  His back generally kept fairly warm from one “frailing” to the next.