ind that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with
him until the required copy was produced. Thus it was he saw literature
in the making.

It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own. His
chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet McMurry;
to drift up and down the world in Pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all
that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared to have
overlooked. He varied on occasion from this ambition. When the first
negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief
period to be a magnificent "middle man" or even the "end-man" of that
combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a
capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators
guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he
volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his
performance.

In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree,
but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his
mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never
could be. Sam Clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest
that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his
consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of
exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely
"showing off" and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of a
vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without
incurring responsibility of any sort. But there was a penalty: he must
allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these
tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. It is difficult
to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could
permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be
thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric
sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but
that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. At all
events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he
concluded to stick to printing as a trade.

We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. At Ament's
he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after
which he was free. When he had got the hang of his work he was usually
done by three i