the
rest of the household got up in the middle of the 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