d youthful troubles.

We must go for his earliest experiences to a town on the Mississippi,
one hundred miles from St. Louis. In the year 1839, the Clemens family
moved to Hannibal from a still smaller town in Missouri, named
Florida. The youngest child in the Clemens family was four years old.
He was named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. For eight years this boy roved
over the hills and through the woods with his playmates. There was a
cave near Hannibal. Many strange creatures were said to hide in its
depths. Also, there was Bear Creek where the boys went swimming. Young
Sam tried hard to learn to swim. Several times he was dragged ashore
just in time to save his life, but at last he learned to swim better
than any of his friends.

Then there was the river, the broad Mississippi.

"It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm
was permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world.
The river with its islands, its great slow moving rafts, its marvelous
steamboats that were like fairyland, and its stately current going to
the sea. How it held him! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He
would venture out on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat, when he
was barely strong enough to lift an oar out of the water."

We are told that when Sam Clemens was only nine years of age he
managed to board one of the river steamers. He hid under a boat on the
upper deck. After the steamer started he sat watching the shore slip
past. Then came a heavy rain and a wet, shivering, little boy was
found by one of the crew. At the next stop he was put ashore and
relatives, who lived there, took him home, and so ended his first
journey upon the river.

Years later he became a pilot on a Mississippi river boat and made
many trips from New Orleans up the river and back. Such a trip
required thirty-five days.

While acting as a river pilot, Samuel Clemens heard the name, "Mark
Twain." An old riverman had used it as an assumed name, taking the
term from the cry of the boatmen as they tested the depth of the
river. Samuel Clemens had an intense love of joking and fun, so when
he first began to write, he suddenly thought it would be amusing to
sign some name other than his own. Therefore, he signed his articles
"Mark Twain." This name clung to him, and many persons forgot or never
knew that his real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Accordingly, in the river of his boyhood love, he found the name by
whi