or dinner at Burlington. After
despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove
up, ready for departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe
around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further
to do. A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, "Miss,
do you go by this stage?" I said, "Oh, I forgot!" and sprang out
and helped her in. A wife was a new kind of possession to which I
had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her.

Orion's wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens's
girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early
days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it
was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk. Brother Sam came up
from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five
dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The office at this
time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street,
in the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company. Henry
Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad by the
name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came
in for social evenings. Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who
clerked in the book-store on the ground floor.

These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher,
Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for
their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone
to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing
to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next
evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had
found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played
tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to
join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but
they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and
denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night
organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German
apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick
Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a
fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to
laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would
run if a gun were really poi