Wesley, The slave you were thinking of is Sandy, the rent-a-slave Clemens refers to in his Autobiography, p.102. Clemens also recalls an incident in which a slave is killed when its owner, incensed by some minor "infraction," strikes him in the head with a chunk of iron. As I recall, the owner was frowned on for this action, not because of his obvious inhumanity, but because the act showed a cavalier attitude toward valuable property, as if he had sabotaged a critical piece of farm equipment. These incidents are recalled, of course, almost twenty years following the writing of Life on the Mississippi, when Twain's memory, as he himself indicated, might have had a predisposition to produce events that never happened. Martin Zehr Kansas City, Missouri