I remember it very well, though I was but two and a half years old at the time. The family packed up everything and started in wagons for Hannibal, on the Mississippi, thirty miles away. Toward night, when they camped and counted up the children, one was missing. I was the one. I had been left behind.
Parents ought always to count the children before they start.
I was having a good enough time playing by myself until I found that the doors were fastened and that there was a grisly deep silence brooding over the place. I knew, then, that the family were gone, and that they had forgotten me. I spent the afternoon in captivity and was not rescued until the gloaming had fallen and the place was alive with ghosts. My brother Henry was six months old at that time. I used to remember his walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old.