Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835, at Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from Tennessee and who removed soon after his son’s birth to Hannibal, a little town on the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what were the circumstances of Mr. Clemen’s boyhood we can see for ourselves in the convincing pages of _Tom Sawyer_. Mr. Howells has called Hannibal “a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town”; and Mr. Clemens, who silently abhorred slavery, was of a slave-owning family. When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little and of book learning still less, but life itself is not a bad teacher for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his chances. He spent six years in the printing office of the little local paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York. When he was nineteen he went back to the home of his boyhood and presently resolved to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learned the river he has told us in _Life on the Mississippi_, wherein his adventures, his experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub pilot are recorded with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in the pages of _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Pudd’nhead Wilson_. But toward the end of the ’fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy as a carrier; and in the beginning of the ’sixties the Civil War broke out and the Mississippi no longer went unvexed to the sea. The skill, slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting, not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the Northwest with his brother, who had been appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada. Thus the man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone East as a jour-printer, who had been again and again up and down the Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate knowledge of American life