Part 15 (1/2)

My brother Henry was sixinto a fire outdoors when he was a week old It was re like that, which occurred when I was so young

And it was stillto the delusion, for thirty years, that I _did_ remember it--for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age If I had stopped to reflect, I should not have burdenedIt is believed by many people that an impression deposited in a child's memory within the first two years of its life cannot remain there five years, but that is an error The incident of Benvenuto Cellini and the salamander must be accepted as authentic and trustworthy; and then that remarkable and indisputable instance in the experience of Helen Keller--however, I will speak of that at another tirandfather drink his whiskey toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any rown old, and er I could re, whether it had happened or not; but , now, and soon I shall be so I cannot reo to pieces like this, but we all have to do it

My uncle, John A Quarles, was a farmer, and his place was in the country four ht children, and fifteen or twenty negroes, and was also fortunate in other ways Particularly in his character I have not couest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after we removed to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old I have never consciously used him or his wife in a book, but his farm has come very handy to me in literature, once or twice In ”Huck Finn” and in ”Tom Sawyer Detective” I moved it down to Arkansas It was all of six hundred e farm; five hundred acres, perhaps, but I could have done it if it had been twice as large And as for thefor that; I would encies of literature required it

It was a heavenly place for a boy, that far one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it , wild and taeese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot ”wheat bread,” hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, Irish potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, ”clabber”; waterarden--apple pie, peach pie, pus, peach cobbler--I can't res were cooked was perhaps the main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken

These things have never been properly cooked in the North--in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as oes The North thinks it kno to ross superstition Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it The North seldom tries to fry chicken, and this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe This is not hearsay; it is experience that is speaking In Europe it is i various kinds of bread blazing hot is ”American,” but that is too broad a spread; it is custom in the South, but is much less than that in the North In the North and in Europe hot bread is considered unhealthy

This is probably another fussy superstition, like the European superstition that ice-water is unhealthy Europe does not need ice-water, and does not drink it; and yet, notwithstanding this, its word for it is better than ours, because it describes it, whereas ours doesn't Europe calls it ”iced” water Our word describes water made from melted ice--a drink which we have but little acquaintance with

It sees iven us any refreshment which, taken in moderation, is unwholesome, except microbes

Yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation They pay this price for health And health is all they get for it How strange it is; it is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry

The fare yard, and the yard was fenced on three sides with rails and on the rear side with high palings; against these stood the ss was the orchard; beyond the orchard were the negro quarter and the tobacco-fields The front yard was entered over a stile, hts; I do not reate In a corner of the front yard were a dozen lofty hickory-trees and a dozen black-walnuts, and in the nutting season riches were to be gathered there

Down a piece, abreast the house, stood a little log cabin against the rail fence; and there the woody hill fell sharply away, past the barns, the corn-crib, the stables and the tobacco-curing house, to a liravelly bed and curved and frisked in and out and here and there and yonder in the deep shade of overhanging foliage and vines--a divine place for wading, and it had swi-pools, too, which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us For ere little Christian children, and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit

In the little log cabin lived a bedridden white-headed slave woman e visited daily, and looked upon with awe, for we believed she was upwards of a thousand years old and had talked with Moses The younger negroes credited these statistics, and had furnished theood faith We accommodated all the details which came to us about her; and so we believed that she had lost her health in the long desert trip coain She had a round bald place on the crown of her head, and we used to creep around and gaze at it in reverent silence, and reflect that it was caused by fright through seeing Pharaoh drowned We called her ”Aunt”

Hannah, Southern fashi+on She was superstitious like the other negroes; also, like thereat faith in prayer, and eencies, but not in cases where a dead certainty of result was urgent Whenever witches were around she tied up the remnant of her wool in little tufts, hite thread, and this proroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age ere in effect co the phrase as a modification We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered coood friend, ally and adviser in ”Uncle Dan'l,” a ro quarter, whose sympathies ide and waruile He has served me well, these many, many years

I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcoed him in books under his own name and as ”Jim,” and carted him all around--to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon--and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright It was on the far for his race andand this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment

The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it No one arraigned it in ainst it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind--and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they ise and said nothing

In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never

There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this ood deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years We had a little slave boy e had hired from some one, there in Hannibal He was froht away from his family and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing--it was , unendurable At last, one day, I lost alltofor an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and _wouldn't_ she please shut him up The tears ca like this--

”Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not re, and that co, and I cannot bear it He will never see his , I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it If you were older, you would understand lad”

It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to e words, but she had a natural gift forshborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last--especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit She has coures as Tom Sawyer's ”Aunt Polly” I fitted her out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any I used Sandy once, also; it was in ”Toet him to ash the fence, but it did not work I do not remember what name I called him by in the book

I can see the fars, all its details; the family room of the house, with a ”trundle” bed in one corner and a spinning-wheel in another--a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited, and filledspirits of the dead: the vast fireplace, piled high, on winter nights, with flaary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the ja,his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly ues and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children roht; ”split”-bottomed chairs here and there, so, with confidence; in the early cold le of children, in shi+rts and che--they could not bear to leave that coo out on the wind-swept floor-space between the house and kitchen where the general tin basin stood, and wash

Along outside of the front fence ran the country road; dusty in the suood place for snakes--they liked to lie in it and sun themselves; when they were rattlesnakes or puff adders, we killed theed to the fabled ”hoop” breed, we fled, without shaarters” we carried them home and put them in Aunt Patsy's work-basket for a surprise; for she was prejudiced against snakes, and alhen she took the basket in her lap and they began to cliet used to the And she was always cold toward bats, too, and could not bear them; and yet I think a bat is as friendly a bird as there is My mother was Aunt Patsy's sister, and had the same wild superstitions A bat is beautifully soft and silky: I do not know any creature that is pleasanter to the touch, or is ht spirit I know all about these coleoptera, because our great cave, three miles below Hannibal, was ht thee if it was a school day, because then I had ostensibly been to school and hadn't any bats She was not a suspicious person, but full of trust and confidence; and when I said ”There's so in my coat pocket for you,” she would put her hand in But she always took it out again, herself; I didn't have to tell her It was remarkable, the way she couldn't learn to like private bats

I think she was never in the cave in her life; but everybody else went there Many excursion parties came from considerable distances up and down the river to visit the cave It was led wilderness of narrow and lofty clefts and passages It was an easy place to get lost in; anybody could do it--including the bats I got lost in itwith a lady, and our last candle burned down to alhts winding about in the distance

”Injun Joe” the half-breed got lost in there once, and would have starved to death if the bats had run short But there was no chance of that; there were myriads of them He told me all his story In the book called ”Tom Sawyer” I starved him entirely to death in the cave, but that was in the interest of art; it never happened ”General” Gaines, as our first town drunkard before Jiot the place, was lost in there for the space of a week, and finally pushed his handkerchief out of a hole in a hilltop near Saverton, several miles down the river fro hi the matter with his statistics except the handkerchief I knew him for years, and he hadn't any But it could have been his nose That would attract attention

Beyond the road where the snakes sunned thehted path led a quarter of a ed abruptly upon a level great prairie which was covered ild strawberry-plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests The strawberries were fragrant and fine, and in the season ere generally there in the crisp freshness of the early rass and the woods were ringing with the first songs of the birds

Down the forest slopes to the left were the swings They were s When they becaerous They usually broke when a child was forty feet in the air, and this hy so many bones had to be mended every year I had no ill-luck ht of the the, for the doctor worked by the year--25 for the whole fa and Meredith They not only tended an entire family for 25 a year, but furnished the est persons could hold a whole dose Castor-oil was the principal beverage

The dose was half a dipperful, with half a dipperful of New Orleans ood, which it never did The next standby was calomel; the next, rhubarb; and the next, jalap Then they bled the patient, and put mustard-plasters on him It was a dreadful system, and yet the death-rate was not heavy The calomel was nearly sure to salivate the patient and cost him some of his teeth