lini and the salamander must be accepted as
authentic and trustworthy; and then that remarkable and indisputable
instance in the experience of Helen Keller--however, I will speak of
that at another time. For many years I believed that I remembered
helping my grandfather drink his whiskey toddy when I was six weeks old,
but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my
memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could
remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are
decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the
things that happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all
have to do it.

My uncle, John A. Quarles, was a farmer, and his place was in the
country four miles from Florida. He had eight children, and fifteen or
twenty negroes, and was also fortunate in other ways. Particularly in
his character. I have not come across a better man than he was. I was
his guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after
we removed to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old. I have
never consciously used him or his wife in a book, but his farm has come
very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In "Huck Finn" and in
"Tom Sawyer Detective" I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six
hundred miles, but it was no trouble, it was not a very large farm;
five hundred acres, perhaps, but I could have done it if it had been
twice as large. And as for the morality of it, I cared nothing for that;
I would move a State if the exigencies of literature required it.

It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John's. The
house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting
it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of
that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me
cry to think of them. Fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys,
ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants,
partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat
cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on
the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, Irish
potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber";
watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloups--all fresh from the garden--apple
pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--I can't
remember the rest. The way that