he door. The two were great chums.

"What will you have, Sam?" he asked.

"Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I'm in trouble. I want somebody to
light my pipe."

"Why don't you light it yourself?" Brownell asked.

"I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for
me."

Brownell scratched a match, stooped down, and applied it.

"What are you reading, Sam?"

"Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book. One of these days I'll write
a funnier book myself."

Brownell laughed. "No, you won't, Sam," he said. "You're too lazy ever
to write a book."

Years later, in the course of a lecture which he delivered in Keokuk,
Mark Twain said that he supposed the most untruthful man in the world
lived right there in Keokuk, and that his name was Ed Brownell.

Orion Clemens did not have the gift of prosperity, and his
printing-office did not flourish. When he could no longer pay Sam's wages
he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all,
though this was of less consequence, since his mother, now living with
Pamela, was well provided for. The disorder of the office, however,
distressed him. He wrote home that he could not work without system, and,
a little later, that he was going to leave Keokuk, that, in fact, he was
planning a great adventure--a trip to the upper Amazon!

His interest in the Amazon had been awakened by a book. Lynch and
Herndon had surveyed the upper river, and Lieutenant Herndon's book was
widely read. Sam Clemens, propped up in bed, pored over it through long
evenings, and nightly made fabulous fortunes collecting cocoa and other
rare things--resolving, meantime, to start in person for the upper Amazon
with no unnecessary delay. Boy and man, Samuel Clemens was the same.
His vision of grand possibilities ahead blinded him to the ways and means
of arrival. It was an inheritance from both sides of his parentage.
Once, in old age, he wrote:

"I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing
things and reflecting afterward . . . . When I am reflecting on
these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think."

He believed, however, that he had reflected carefully concerning the
Amazon, and that in a brief time he should be there at the head of an
expedition, piling up untold wealth. He even stirred the imaginations of
two other adventurers, a Dr. Martin and a young man named Ward. To
Henry, then in St. Louis, he wrote, August 5, 1856: