Few authors can boast of having duplicated their own lives in the lives of their characters as truly and uproariously as did Mark Twain. For Mark Twain did not just imagine the exploits of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; he got into many of the very same scrapes himself when he was young Sam Clemens in Hannibal, Missouri. Like Tom and Huck, Sam used every available dodge to stay away from school and he loved nothing better than to sit fishing on...