Little Sam, however, was not yet ready to enjoy the island and the cave.  He was still delicate—­the least promising of the family.  He was queer and fanciful, and rather silent.  He walked in his sleep and was often found in the middle of the night, fretting with the cold, in some dark corner.  Once he heard that a neighbor’s children had the measles, and, being very anxious to catch the complaint, slipped over to the house and crept into bed with an infected playmate.  Some days later, Little Sam’s relatives gathered about his bed to see him die.  He confessed, long after, that the scene gratified him.  However, he survived, and fell into the habit of running away, usually in the direction of the river.

“You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” his mother once said to him, in her old age.

“I suppose you were afraid I wouldn’t live,” he suggested.

She looked at him with the keen humor which had been her legacy to him.  “No, afraid you would,” she said.  Which was only her joke, for she had the tenderest of hearts, and, like all mothers, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother’s care.  It was chiefly on his account that she returned each year to Florida to spend the summer on John Quarles’s farm.

If Uncle John Quarles’s farm was just an ordinary Missouri farm, and his slaves just average negroes, they certainly never seemed so to Little Sam.  There was a kind of glory about everything that belonged to Uncle John, and it was not all imagination, for some of the spirit of that jovial, kindly hearted man could hardly fail to radiate from his belongings.

The farm was a large one for that locality, and the farm-house was a big double log building—­that is, two buildings with a roofed-over passage between, where in summer the lavish Southern meals were served, brought in on huge dishes by the negroes, and left for each one to help himself.  Fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens, green corn, watermelon—­a little boy who did not die on that bill of fare would be likely to get well on it, and to Little Sam the farm proved a life-saver.

It was, in fact, a heavenly place for a little boy.  In the corner of the yard there were hickory and black-walnut trees, and just over the fence the hill sloped past barns and cribs to a brook, a rare place to wade, though there were forbidden pools.  Cousin Tabitha Quarles, called “Puss,” his own age, was Little Sam’s playmate, and a slave girl, Mary, who, being six years older, was supposed to keep them out of mischief.  There were swings in the big, shady pasture, where Mary swung her charges and ran under them until their feet touched the branches.  All the woods were full of squirrels and birds and blooming flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; the fence-rows were full of wild blackberries; there were apples and peaches in the orchard, and plenty of melons ripening in the corn.  Certainly it was a glorious place!