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, its stately current swinging to the sea!  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.  He learned to know all its moods and phases.  He felt its kinship.  In some occult way he may have known it as his prototype—­that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea.

His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion.  To be even the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to be a god.

“You can hardly imagine what it meant,” he reflected once, “to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never to take a trip on them.”

He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no longer.  One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.  Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last.  He crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery.  Then it began to rain—­a terrific downpour.  He crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him.  So he was taken down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore.  It was the town of Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who took him home.  Jane Clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way.  These were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and partridges by day, for coons and possums by night.  Sometimes the little boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant just in time for breakfast.

So it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer “Little Sam,” but Sam Clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men and things and a variety of accomplishments.  He had even learned to smoke—­a little—­out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing, though that was a failure.  He had been stung to this effort by a big girl at a school which, with his cousin Puss, he sometimes briefly attended.