night to find him
fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor was summoned for him
oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we
may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days.

Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of
ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles--the black,
deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He
yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys,
who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed
with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some days
later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam's bed to
see him die. According to his own after-confession, this gratified him,
and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However,
he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh
laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise
period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to
various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required.
Without doubt the "measles" incident occurred when he was very
young.]--He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane
Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a
comfort.

"You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she said to him
once, in her old age.

"I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live," he suggested, in his
tranquil fashion.

She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty
years. "No; afraid you would," she said. But that was only her joke, for
she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers
in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her
mother's care.

It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John
Quarles's farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that
an incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole
family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June
Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied
by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive,
leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning.
The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and
Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens