at warm mid-June morning,
while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis,
four out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded
with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown
out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded
and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale
steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the
Mississippi a river of death and tears.

Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor
of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty
others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry
had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was
considered hopeless.

Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the
explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred
yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt,
he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did
after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the
rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to
the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could
be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and
landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours
until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that
time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded
in his work of rescue; it will never be known.

His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and
remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry's presence
on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own
absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He
wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the
doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. He sent word of
the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and
was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but
hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies
were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy's
youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some
medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these
also took special inter