Excerpt from The Story of Sam Tag: Age From Ten to Fifteen; From 1860 to 1865 ON the birth-page of my mother's Bible these lines can be found: This day a son is born to me. I hope a good and useful man he'll be. I'll teach him nothing bad, but all the good I can. My baby boy's name is Sam. When I grew up to be a good-sized boy I had a fight with another boy, and when the fight was over it took the skill of a physician to adjust the boy's toe in proper position, for I had bitten it nearly off. For this act the negroes put an appendix to my name, calling me Sam Toe. This irritated my mother, and she threatened to give the usual thirty-nine lashes on the bare back of the next one that called me by that name. The appendix stuck hard and fast, however, but the fear of the lash caused them to change it from Toe to Tag, and it was Sam Tag, which name I bore until I went to another State to live among strangers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.