I have not come across a better man than he was. I washis guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after weremoved to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old. I have neverconsciously used him or his wife in a book but his farm has come veryhandy to me in literature once or twice. In Huck Finn and in Tom Sawyer,Detective I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six hundred milesbut it was no trouble; it was not a Very large farm——five hundred acres,perhaps——but I could have done it if it had been twice as large. And asfor the morality of it, I cared nothing for that; I would move a state if theexigencies of literature required it.
It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John's. Thehouse was a double log one, with a spacious floor （roofed in） connectingit with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of thatshady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals——well, it makes me cryto think of them. Fried chicken, roast pig; wild and tame turkeys, ducksand geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges,prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot"wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear,succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweetpotatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber"; watermelons, muskmelons,cantaloupes——all fresh from the garden; apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie,apple dumplings, peach cobbler——I can't remember the rest. The way thatthe things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor——particularly acertain few of the dishes. For instance.
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