Little Sam got into trouble once with the watermelons.  One of them had not ripened quite enough when he ate several slices of it.  Very soon after he was seized with such terrible cramps that some of the household did not think he could live.

But his mother said:  “Sammy will pull through.  He was not born to die that way.”  Which was a true prophecy.  Sammy’s slender constitution withstood the strain.  It was similarly tested more than once during those early years.  He was regarded as a curious child.  At times dreamy and silent, again wild-headed and noisy, with sudden impulses that sent him capering and swinging his arms into the wind until he would fall with shrieks and spasms of laughter and madly roll over and over in the grass.  It is not remembered that any one prophesied very well for his future at such times.

The negro quarters on Uncle John’s farm were especially fascinating.  In one cabin lived a bedridden old woman whom the children looked upon with awe.  She was said to be a thousand years old, and to have talked with Moses.  She had lost her health in the desert, coming out of Egypt.  She had seen Pharaoh drown, and the fright had caused the bald spot on her head.  She could ward off witches and dissolve spells.

Uncle Dan’l was another favorite, a kind-hearted, gentle soul, who long after, as Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, would win world-wide love and sympathy.

Through that far-off, warm, golden summer-time Little Sam romped and dreamed and grew.  He would return each summer to the farm during those early years.  It would become a beautiful memory.  His mother generally kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace.  Sixty years later he wrote: 

“I can see the room yet with perfect clearness.  I can see all its belongings, all its details; the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another—­a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me and made me homesick and low- spirited and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner, and my uncle in the other, smoking his corn-cob pipe.”

It is hard not to tell more of the farm, for the boy who was one day going to write of Tom and Huck and the rest learned there so many things that Tom and Huck would need to know.

But he must have “book-learning,” too, Jane Clemens said.  On his return to Hannibal that first summer, she decided that Little Sam was ready for school.  He was five years old and regarded as a “stirring child.”