"MARK TWAIN'S LIFE TEACHES THAT POVERTY IS AN INCENTIVE RATHER THAN A BAR: AND THAT ANY BOY, HOWEVER HUMBLE HIS BIRTH AND SURROUNDINGS, MAY BY HONESTY AND INDUSTRY ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS." --GEORGE A. MAHAN. That inscription made me think of many things. It made me think of Napoleon's inscription on the statue of Henri IV, and of Judge Thatcher's talk with Tom Sawyer, in the Sunday school, and of Mr. Walters, the Sunday school superintendent, in the same book, and of certain moral lessons drawn by Andrew Carnegie. And not the least thing of which it made me think was the mischievous, shiftless, troublesome, sandy-haired young rascal who hated school and Sunday school and yet became the more than honest, more than industrious man, commemorated there. If I did not feel the inspiration of that place while considering the tablet, the back yard gave me real delight. There were the old outhouses, the old back stair, the old back fence, and the little window looking down on them--the window of Tom Sawyer, beneath which, in the gloaming, Huckleberry Finn made catcalls to summon forth his fellow bucaneer. And here, below the window, was the place where Pamela Clemens, Sam's sister, the original of Cousin Mary in "Tom Sawyer," had her candy pull on that evening when a boy, in his undershirt, came tumbling from above. And to think that, wretched as this place was, the Clemens family were forced to leave it for a time because they were too poor to live there! Of a certainty Mark Twain's early life was as squalid as his later life was rich. However, it was always colorful--he saw to that, straight through from the barefoot days to those of the white suits, the Oxford gown, and the European courts. Not far back of the house rises the "Cardiff Hill" of the stories; in reality, Holliday's Hill, so called because long ago there lived, up at the top, old Mrs. Holliday, who burned a lamp in her window every night as a mark for river pilots to run by. It was down that hill that the boys rolled the stones which startled churchgoers, and that final, enormous rock which, by a fortunate freak of chance, hurdled a negro and his wagon instead of striking and destroying them. Ah, how rich in racy memories are those streets! Somewhere among them, in that part of town which has come to be called "Mark-Twainville," is the very spot, unmarked and unknown, where young Sam Clemens picked up a scrap of newspaper upon which was printed a portion of the tale of Joan of Arc--a scrap of paper which, Paine says, gave him his first literary stimulus. And somewhere else, not far from the house, is the place where Orion Clemens, Sam's elder brother, ran the ill-starred newspaper on which Sam worked, setting type and doing his first writing. It was, indeed, in Orion's paper that Sam's famous verse, "To Mary in Hannibal," was published--the title condensed, because of the narrow column, to read: "To Mary in H--l."