The father of Mark Twain, John Clemens, a dreamer and an idealist, had left Virginia with his young wife early in the twenties to join the restless tide that even then was setting strongly westward. Their first settlement was at Gainsborough, Tennessee, where was born their first son, Orion, but they remained there not long. Indeed, like all emigrants of their type, they remained nowhere long. During the next ten or eleven years five other children were born to them at four different stations along the line of their westward progress. When the fifth child arrived, to be christened Samuel Langhorne, they were living at Florida, Missouri, a squalid little hamlet fifty miles west of the Mississippi. That was November 30, 1835. Four years later they made what proved to be their last move, settling at Hannibal, Missouri, a small river town about a hundred miles above St. Louis. Here it was that the future Mark Twain spent the next fourteen years, those formative years between four and eighteen that determine so greatly the bent of the later life. The Hannibal of the forties and the fifties was hardly a town one would pick deliberately for the education of a great man of letters. It lay just a few miles above the northern line of Pike County--that Pike County, Missouri, that gave name to the shiftless, hand-to-mouth, ague-shaken type of humanity later to be celebrated so widely as the Pike. Hannibal was not a Pike community, but it was typically southwestern in its somnolent, slave-holding, care-free atmosphere. The one thing that forever rescued it from the commonplace was the River, the tremendous Mississippi, source of endless dreams and romance. Mark Twain has given us a picture, perfect as an etching, of this river and the little town that nestled beside it: