The child was puny, and did not make a very sturdy fight for life.  Still he weathered along, season after season, and survived two stronger children, Margaret and Benjamin.  By 1839 Judge Clemens had lost faith in Florida.  He removed his family to Hannibal, and in this Mississippi River town the little lad whom the world was to know as Mark Twain spent his early life.  In Tom Sawyer we have a picture of the Hannibal of those days and the atmosphere of his boyhood there.

His schooling was brief and of a desultory kind.  It ended one day in 1847, when his father died and it became necessary that each one should help somewhat in the domestic crisis.  His brother Orion, ten years his senior, was already a printer by trade.  Pamela, his sister; also considerably older, had acquired music, and now took a few pupils.  The little boy Sam, at twelve, was apprenticed to a printer named Ament.  His wages consisted of his board and clothes—­“more board than clothes,” as he once remarked to the writer.

He remained with Ament until his brother Orion bought out a small paper in Hannibal in 1850.  The paper, in time, was moved into a part of the Clemens home, and the two brothers ran it, the younger setting most of the type.  A still younger brother, Henry, entered the office as an apprentice.  The Hannibal journal was no great paper from the beginning, and it did not improve with time.  Still, it managed to survive—­country papers nearly always manage to survive—­year after year, bringing in some sort of return.  It was on this paper that young Sam Clemens began his writings—­burlesque, as a rule, of local characters and conditions —­usually published in his brother’s absence; generally resulting in trouble on his return.  Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his brother’s talent he might have turned it into capital even then.

In 1853 (he was not yet eighteen) Sam Clemens grew tired of his limitations and pined for the wider horizon of the world.  He gave out to his family that he was going to St. Louis, but he kept on to New York, where a World’s Fair was then going on.  In New York he found employment at his trade, and during the hot months of 1853 worked in a printing-office in Cliff Street.  By and by he went to Philadelphia, where he worked a brief time; made a trip to Washington, and presently set out for the West again, after an absence of more than a year.

Onion, meanwhile, had established himself at Muscatine, Iowa, but soon after removed to Keokuk, where the brothers were once more together, till following their trade.  Young Sam Clemens remained in Keokuk until the winter of 1856-57, when he caught a touch of the South-American fever then prevalent; and decided to go to Brazil.  He left Keokuk for Cincinnati, worked that winter in a printing-office there, and in April took the little steamer, Paul Jones, for New Orleans, where he expected to find a South-American