"_To such a task we dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other._" --PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGE. [Illustration: MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)] MARK TWAIN "Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-water. You got to go all by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there's a spunk-water stump, and just as it's midnight you back up against the stump and jam your hand in it and say: "Barley-corn, Barley-corn, Injun meal shorts, "Spunk-water, spunk-water, swaller these warts," and then walk away quick eleven steps, with your eyes shut and then turn round three times and walk home without speaking to anybody. Because if you do speak, the charm's busted. "I've took off thousands of warts that way, Huck. I play with frogs so much that I've always got considerable warts. Sometimes I take 'em off with a bean." "Yes, a bean's good. I've done that." "But say, Huck, how do you cure 'em with dead cats?" By this time, doubtless you are saying, "Oh, I know from what book you are quoting. I have Tom Sawyer at home and Huckleberry Finn, too. I read them over and over." But would you not like to know something about the man, who could write so understandingly of boys? Suppose we read the story of his life and see if we can decide what gave him his wide knowledge of games and adventures, of boyish larks and 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."