At different
times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the
rescue. He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she
hadn't been uneasy about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about
him the whole time. But when he inquired further if she was afraid he
would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking
out the facts--that she had been afraid he would!
His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his
writings.
In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a
lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to
Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all
the dignity of a local autocrat. His forum was a "dingy" office,
furnished with "a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a
puncheon bench.
Pages:
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32