Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/408

 MARK TWAIN

his education in real life began. He had always been a delicate boy, and his father, in consequence, had been lenient in the matter of enforcing attendance at school, although he had been profoundly anxious that his children should be well educated. His wish was fulfilled, although not in the way he had ex pected. It is a fortunate thing for literature that Mark Twain was never ground into smooth uni formity under the scholastic emery wheel. He has made the world his university, and in men, and books, and strange places, and all the phases of an infinitely varied life, has built an education broad and deep, on the foundations of an undisturbed in dividuality.

His high school was a village printing-office, where his elder brother Orion was conducting a newspaper. The thirteen-year-old boy served in all capacities, and in the occasional absences of his chief he reveled in personal journalism, with original illustrations hacked on wooden blocks with a jack-knife, to an extent that riveted the town s attention, &quot;but not its admiration,&quot; as his brother plaintively confessed. The editor spoke with feeling, for he had to take the consequences of these exploits on his return.

From his earliest childhood young Clemens had been of an adventurous disposition. Before he was thirteen, he had been extracted three times from the Mississippi, and six times from Bear Creek, in a sub stantially drowned condition, but his mother, with the high confidence in his future that never deserted her, merely remarked: &quot; People who are born to be hanged are safe in the water,&quot; By 1853 the Han-

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