d to laugh at him. They
called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were
really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken; seven years later
Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the
way.

Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said:

"I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on
the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it is
yourself. You couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw
recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? Won't you please stop it? It
bothers my pupils."

Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise.

"Does it?" he said, very deliberately. "Why didn't you mention it
before? To be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies."

They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but
joined one of the singing--classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good
voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He
did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular
member of the singing-class.

They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint
fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a
"fool"--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he
kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and
indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really
light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now
and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau
rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none. Ella
Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella Patterson
(related through Orion's wife and generally known as "Ick"), and Belle
Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were many more.
He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of his pranks
and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often carried a book
under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the tales of Edgar
Allan Poe.

He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late,
sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed,
and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety,
because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular
short pipe of daytime use.

But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it wou