It was the river that he cared for most.  It was the pathway that led to the great world outside.  He would sit by it for hours and dream.  He would venture out on it in a quietly borrowed boat, when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar.  He learned to know all its moods and phases.

More than anything in the world he hungered to make a trip on one of the big, smart steamers that were always passing.  “You can hardly imagine what it meant,” he reflected, once, “to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never take a trip on them.”

It was at the mature age of nine that he found he could endure this no longer.  One day when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.  Then the signal-bells rang, the steamer backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last.  He crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery.  Then it began to rain—­a regular downpour.  He crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him.  He was dragged out and at the next stop set ashore.  It was the town of Louisiana, where there were Lampton relatives, who took him home.  Very likely the home-coming was not entirely pleasant, though a “lesson,” too, in his general education.

And always, each summer, there was the farm, where his recreation was no longer mere girl plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but sports with his older boy cousins, who went hunting with the men, for partridges by day and for ’coons and ’possums by night.  Sometimes the little boy followed the hunters all night long, and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning, fresh, hungry, and triumphant, just in time for breakfast.  So it is no wonder that Little Sam, at nine, was no longer Little Sam, but plain Sam Clemens, and grown up.  If there were doubtful spots in his education—­matters related to smoking and strong words—­it is also no wonder, and experience even in these lines was worth something in a book like Tom Sawyer.

The boy Sam Clemens was not a particularly attractive lad.  He was rather undersized, and his head seemed too large for his body.  He had a mass of light sandy hair, which he plastered down to keep from curling.  His eyes were keen and blue and his features rather large.  Still, he had a fair, delicate complexion when it was not blackened by grime and tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile and a slow way of speaking that made him a favorite with his companions.  He did not talk much, and was thought to be rather dull—­was certainly so in most of his lessons—­but, for some reason, he never spoke that every playmate in hearing did not stop, whatever he was doing, to listen.  Perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a casual remark that his peculiar drawl