This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPE By Mark Twain Chapter 50 The Original Jacobs We had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers. Now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both the shore and on the river. He was very tall, well built, and handsome, and in his old age, as I remember him, his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady, and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. He was the patriarch of the craft. He had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats, and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot still surviving at the time I speak of had ever turned a wheel. Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. He left a diary behind him, but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi. At the time of his death a correspondent of the St. Louis Republican called the following items from the diary. In February 1825 he shipped on board the steamer Rambler at Florence, Alabama, and made, during that year, three trips to New Orleans and back, this on the General Carroll, between Nashville and New Orleans. It was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. The proximity of the folks all to the pilot house no doubt rendered this an easy matter, but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. In 1827 we find him on board the President, a boat of 285 tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans. Thence he joined the Jubilee in 1828, and on this boat he did his first piloting in the St. Louis trade, his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St. Genevieve. On May 26, 1836 he completed and left Pittsburgh in charge of the steamer Prairie, a boat of 400 tons, and the first steamer with a stateroom cabin ever seen at St. Louis. In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day. In fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress. As general items of river history we quote the following marginal notes from his general log. In March 1825 General Lefayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the low pressure steamer Natchez. In January 1828 21 steamers left the New Orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of General Jackson's visit to that city. In 1830 the North America made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in six days, best time on record to that date. It has since been made in two days and ten hours. In 1831 the Red River Cut-Off formed. In 1832 steamer Hudson made the run from White River to Helena, a distance of 75 miles, in twelve hours. This was the source of much talk and speculation among the parties directly interested. In 1839 Great Horseshoe Cut-Off formed. Up to the present time a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to New Orleans which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles or an average of eighty-six miles a day. Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots a chill fell there and talking ceased. For this reason whenever six pilots were gathered together there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot and the elder ones would be always showing off before these poor fellows, making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree by talking largely and vaporously of old time experiences on the river, always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible and envy the old stages in the like degree, and how these complacent bald heads would swell and brag and lie and date back ten, fifteen, twenty years, and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters. And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine son of antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant, and imagine the feelings of those bald heads and the exaltation of their recent audience when the ancient Captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature about islands that had disappeared, and cut-offs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot house. Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion and spread disaster and humiliation around him. If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history, and he never used the same island twice, and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details. Never spoke of the State of Mississippi, for instance, now. He would say, when the State of Mississippi was where Arkansas now is, and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind, now he would say, when Louisiana was up the river farther, or when Missouri was on the Illinois side. The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them Mark Twain, and give them to the New Orleans Picayune. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable, and thus far they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river today, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years, and now and then he would mention island so-and-so, and follow it in parentheses, with some such observation as disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly. In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chafe the Mark Twain paragraphs with unsparing mockery. It's so chanced that one of these paragraphs—footnote, the original M.S. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans. It reads as follows. Vicksburg, May 4, 1859. My opinion, for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans, the water is higher this far up than it has been since eight. My opinion is that the water will be feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. I, cellars, of one of these paragraphs, became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesked it, broadly, very broadly, stringing my phantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a cub at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the New Orleans' true delta. It was a great pity, for it did nobody any worthy service. And it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no malice in my rubbish, but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know, then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is, for the first time, pilloried in print. Captain Sellers did me the honour to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honour, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honour to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it.  He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed Mark Twain to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific Coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a known to-gear, so I confiscated the ancient mariners' discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands, a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth. How I have succeeded it would not be modest in me to say. The Captain had an honourable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he died. It stands over his grave now in Bellfontaine Cemetery, St. Louis. It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot-wheel, and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder if duty required it. The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip we saw as we approached New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with a white glare of five miles of electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. End of chapter 50 We left for St. Louis in the city of Baton Rouge on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit, but lamely accomplished. I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steam-boatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and straightened up for the start, the boat pausing for a good ready in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural and familiar, and so were the shoreward sights, as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a cub, and I judged that he would take the wheel now, and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot-house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen because I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me about a quarter of a century before in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated with somebody else as victim.  The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Richie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixie and himself. This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. By and by when the fog began to clear off I noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank six hundred yards away was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. The faint spectral trees dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog were very pretty things to see. We had a heavy thunderstorm at natches, another at Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot house but me. The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves, and gust after gust followed in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as due their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural. All tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud bank overhead. The river was leaden, all distances the same, and even the far-reaching ranks of combing whitecaps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. The thunder-peels were constant and deafening. Explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher keyed, and more trying to the ear. The lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. The rain poured down in amazing volume. The ear-splitting thunder-peels broke nearer and nearer. The wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and treetops and send them sailing away through space. The pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see what time it was. People boast a good deal about alpine thunderstorms, but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some of which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi I don't wish to. On this up-trip I saw a little tow-head, infant island, half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare, that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere tow-head, where was the use originally in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken in the first place the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a tow-head or a broom-closet or some other little convenience here and there which has got to be supplied no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. We had a succession of black nights going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees, with intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced. Hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careening hither and thither through the white rays, and often a songbird tuned up and fell to singing. We judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well-ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. By means of diligence and activity we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. One was missing, however. He went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. But I found out all about him. His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice blacksmith in our village, and I, a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned awhile. And one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III sword fight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-druck and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis. I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street corner with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, faced bowed and frowning, slouch-hat pulled down over his forehead, imagining himself to be Othello, or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were all struck. I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. However, he casually informed me presently that he was a member of the Walnut Street Theater Company, and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin and a mighty exultation showed through it. He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar for that night, and if I should come, I would see him. If I should come, I said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead. I went away stupefied with astonishment and sang to myself how strange it is. We always thought this fellow a fool, yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honoured. But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended, for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak he asked, Did you see me? No, you weren't there. He looked surprised and disappointed. He said, Yes, I was. Indeed, I was. I was a Roman soldier. Which one? Why, didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank and sometimes marched in procession around the stage? Do you mean the Roman army? Those six sandaled roust abouts in night-shirts with tin shields and helmets that marched around treading on each other's heels in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dress like themselves? That's it! That's it! I was one of them Roman soldiers. I was the next to the last one. A half a year ago I used to always be the last one, but I have been promoted. Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the last, a matter of thirty-four years. Sometimes they cast him for a speaking part, but not an elaborate one. He could be trusted to go and say, My Lord! The carriage waits! But if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain, and he was likely to miss fire. Yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it. And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago. What noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen, and what an inadequate Roman soldier he did make. A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth Street, when a grisly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity, Look here! Have you got that drink yet? A maniac, I judged at first, but all in a flash I recognized him. I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how. Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. Come in and help. He softened and said make it a bottle of champagne, and he was agreeable. He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out resolved to find me or die, and make me answer that question satisfactorily or kill me, though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty years ago. I spent a week there at that time in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. We saw some of the fightings and killings, and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters under command of a military man. We drilled till about ten o'clock at night, then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. Our column moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. We marched and marched, and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my friend, so finally I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home. I was not feeling any solicitude about him, of course, because I knew he was so well armed now that he could take care of himself without any trouble. If I had had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him. I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. I ought to have inquired thirty years ago. I know that. And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets, but in the circumstances he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was. One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the Globe Democrat came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and 23,102 children attended Sunday school. Thus 142,550 persons out of the city's total of 400,000 population respected the day religious-wise. I found these statistics in a condensed form in a telegram of the Associated Press and preserved them. They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in any time. But now that I canvas the figures narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be that there are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town. The other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended church and Sunday school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics, 116,188 went to church and Sunday school. End of Chapter 51 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Chapter 52 A Burning Brand All at once the thought came into my mind, I have not sought out Mr. Brown. Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong feeling, if ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand. The occasion and the circumstances were as follows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said, I have a most remarkable letter here which I want to read to you. If I can do it without breaking down, I must preface it with some explanations, however. The letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance, but, thank God, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. His letter is written to a burglar named Williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain state prison for burglary. Williams was a particularly daring burglar and plied that trade during a number of years. But he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him eight thousand dollars in government bonds. Williams was not a common sort of person by any means. He was a graduate of Harvard College and came of good New England stock. His father was a clergyman. While lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. This fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect, its natural effect. He fell into serious thought. His early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. He put his old life behind him, and became an earnest Christian. Some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions, and strengthened him to continue in his new life. The trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the state prison for the term of nine years, as I have before said. In the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, Jack Hunt, the writer of the letter which I am going to read. You will see that the acquaintance ship bore fruit for Hunt. When Hunt's time was out, he wandered to St. Louis, and from that place he wrote his letter to Williams. The letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course. Prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. The prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. They had not the heart to do it. They read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom I spoke a while ago. The other day I came across an old friend of mine, a clergyman, who had seen this letter, and was full of it. The mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. He promised to get a copy of it for me, and here it is, an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. It has many slang expressions in it, thieves are got, but their meaning has been interlined, in parenthesis, by the prison authorities. Louis, June 9th, 1872 Mr. W., friend Charlie, if I may call you so, I know you are surprised to get a letter from me, but I hope you won't be mad at my writing to you.  It has led me to try and be a better man. I guess you thought I did not care for what you said, and at the first go-off I didn't. But I knowed you was a man who had done big work with good men and want no sucker, nor want gassing and all the boys noted. I used to think at night what you said, and for it I knocked off swearing months before my time was up, for I saw it want no good, know-how. The day my time was up you told me if I would shake the cross, quit stealing, and live on the square for months, it would be the best job I ever done in my life. The state agent gave me a ticket to here, and on the car I thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. When we got to Chicago on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old woman's leather, obtr of her pocket-book. I hadn't no more than got it off when I wished I hadn't done it. For a while before that I made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when I saw the leather was a grip easy to get. But I kept close to her, and when she got out of the cars at a way-place I said, Marm, have you lost something? And she tumbled, discovered her leather was gone off. Gone. Is this it, says I, giving it to her? Well, if you ain't honest, says she, but I hadn't got cheek enough to stand that sort of talk, so I left her in a hurry. When I got here I had one dollar and twenty-five cents left, and I didn't get no work for three days, as I ain't strong enough for roust about on a steamboat for a deckhand. The afternoon of the third day I spent my last ten cents for moons, large round sea-biscuit and cheese, and I felt pretty rough, and was thinking I would have to go on the dyke, picking pockets. Again, when I thought of what you once said about a fellow's calling on the Lord when he was in hard luck, and I thought I would try it once anyhow. But when I tried it, I got stuck on the start, and all I could get off was, Lord, give a poor fellow a chance to square it for three months, for Christ's sake, amen. And I kept to thinkin' of it over and over as I went along. About an hour after that I was in 4th Street, and this is what happened, and is the cause of my being where I am now, and about which I will tell you before I get done writing. As I was walkin' along, heard a big noise, and saw a horse running away with a carriage with two children in it, and I grabbed up a piece of box cover from the sidewalk, and run in the middle of the street, and when the horse came up I smashed him over the head as hard as I could drive. The board split to pieces, and the horse checked up a little, and I grabbed the reins and pulled his head down until he stopped. The gentleman what owned him came running up, and soon as he saw the children were all right. He shook hands with me, and gave me a fifty-dollar greenback, and my asking the Lord to help me come into my head. And I was so thunderstruck I couldn't drop the reins nor say nothing. He saw something was up, and, coming back to me, said, My boy, are you hurt? And the thought come into my head, just then, to ask him for work. And I asked him to take back the bill, and give me a job. Says he, jump in here, and let's talk about it, but keep the money. He asked me if I could take care of horses, and I said yes, for I used to hang round livery-stables, and often would help clean and drive horses. He told me he wanted a man for that work, and would give me sixteen dollars a month, and bored me. You bet I took that chance at once. That night in my little room over the stable I sat a long time thinking over my past life, and of what had just happened, and I just got down on my knees, and thanked the Lord for the job, and to help me to square it, and to bless you for putting me up to it. And the next morning I'd done it again, and got me some new togs, clothes, and a Bible, for I made up my mind after what the Lord had done for me. I would read the Bible every night and morning, and ask him to keep an eye on me. When I had been there about a week, Mr. Brown, that's his name, came in my room one night and saw me reading the Bible. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him no. He asked me how it was I read the Bible instead of papers and books. Well, Charlie, I thought I had better give him a square deal in the start. So I told him all about my being in prison, and about you, and how I had almost done give up looking for work, and how the Lord got me the job when I asked him. And the only way I had to pay him back was to read the Bible and square it, and I asked him to give me a chance for three months.  For I had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me, and now I didn't fear no one giving me a back cap, exposing his past life, and running me off the job. The next morning he called me into the library and gave me another square talk, and advised me to study some every day, and he would help me one or two hours every night. And he gave me a arithmetic, a spelling book, a geography, and a writing book, and he hears me every night. He lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, and got me put in a Bible class in the Sunday school, which I likes very much for it helps me to understand my Bible better. Now, Charlie, the three months on the square are up two months ago, and, as you said, it is the best job I ever did in my life, and I commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a lifetime, Charlie.  I know I love to read his word, and tell him all my troubles, and he helps me, I know, for I have plenty of chances to steal, but I don't feel to, as I once did, and now I take more pleasure in going to church than to the theatre, and that wasn't so once. Our minister and others often talk with me, and a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now. I may be mistaken in my feelings. I will wait a while. But now I feel that God has called me, and on the first Sunday in July I will join the church. Dear friend, I wish I could write to you as I feel, but I can't do it yet. You know, I learned to read and write while prisons and I ain't got well enough long to write as I would talk. I know I ain't spelled all the words right in this, and lots of other mistakes, but you will excuse me, I know, for you know I was brought up in a poor house until I run away, and that I never knew who my father and mother was, and I don't know my right name, and I hope you won't be mad at me. But I have as much right to one name as another, and I have taken your name, for you won't use it when you get out, I know, and you are the man I think most of in the world, so I hope you won't be mad. I am doing well. I put ten dollars a month in bank with twenty-five dollars of the fifty dollars. If you ever want any or all of it, let me know, and it is yours. I wish you would let me send you some now. I send you with this, a receipt for a year of little's living age. I didn't know what you would like, and I told Mr. Brown, and he said he thought you would like it. I wish I was near you so I could send you Chuck, refreshments, on holidays. It would spoil this weather from here, but I will send you a box next Thanksgiving anyway. Next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as light porter, and will advance me as soon as I know a little more. He keeps a big granary store, wholesale. I forgot to tell you of my mission school, Sunday school class. The school is in the Sunday afternoon. I went out two Sunday afternoons and picked up seven kids, little boys, and got them to come in. Two of them knew as much as I did, and I had them put in a class where they could learn something. I don't know much myself, but as these kids can't read, I get on nicely with them. I make sure of them by doing after them every Sunday hour before school time. I also got four girls to come. Tell Mac and Harry about me. If they will come out here when their time is up, I will get them jobs at once. I hope you will excuse this long letter in all mistakes. I wish I could see you for I can't write as I would talk. I hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good. I was afraid when you was bleeding you would die. Give my respects to all the boys, and tell them how I am doing. I am doing well, and everyone here treats me as kind as they can. Mr. Brown is going to write to you some time. I hope some day you will write to me. This letter is from your very true friend, C. W., who you know as Jack Hunt. I send you Mr. Brown's card. Send my letter to him. Here was true eloquence, irresistible eloquence, and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. I have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. The reader of it halted all the way through on a lame and broken voice, yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. He was practicing upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. The result was not promising. However, he determined to risk it and did. He got through tolerably well, but his audience broke down early and stayed in that condition to the end. The fame of the letter spread through the town. A brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a Sunday morning, and let her drowned them in their own tears. Then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his Sunday morning congregation with it. It scored another triumph. The house wept as one individual. My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. He was asked to preach one day. The little church was full. Among the people present were the late Dr. J. G. Holland, the late Mr. Seymour of the New York Times, Mr. Page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think, Senator Fry of Maine. The marvelous letter did its wanted work. All the people were moved. All the people wept. The tears flowed in a steady stream down Dr. Holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. Ah, that unlucky page! And another man. If they had only been in Jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with. The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compere among swindles. It was perfect. It was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal. The reader learns it at this point, but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. My friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences. I begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs. Numbers of people got copies of the letter with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print. Copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far regions. Charles Dudley Warner was at church one day when the worn letter was read and wept over. At the church door afterward he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question, Do you know that letter to be genuine? It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced. But it had that sickening effect which first uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. Some talk followed. Why, what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?  I think it was done by an educated man. The literary artist had detected the literary machinery. If you will look at the letter now you will detect it yourself. It is observable in every line. Straightway the clergyman went off with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him and wrote to a minister residing in that town where Williams had been jailed and converted, asked for light, and also asked if a person in the literary line, meaning me, might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. He presently received this answer. REVEREND My dear friend, in regard to that convict's letter there can be no doubt as to its genuineness, Williams, to whom it was written, lay in our jail and profess to have been converted, and Reverend Mr. the chaplain had great faith in the genuineness of the change as much as one can have in such case. The letter was sent to one of our ladies who is a Sunday school teacher, sent either by Williams himself or the chaplain of the state's prison, probably. She has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity lest it might seem a breach of confidence or be an injury to Williams. In regard to its publication I can give no permission, though if the names and places were omitted and especially if sent out of the country I think you might take the responsibility and do it. It is a wonderful letter which no Christian genius much less one unsanctified could ever have written, as showing the work of grace in a human heart and in a very degraded and wicked one it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. Mr. Brown, of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man. Do all whom you send from Hartford serve their master as well? P.S. Williams is still in the state's prison serving out a long sentence of nine years, I think. He has been sick and threatened with consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately. This lady that I speak of corresponds with him, I presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. This letter arrived a few days after it was written, and up went Mr. Williams' stock again. Mr. Warner's low down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave where it apparently belonged. It was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway, and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that too can play at. I've witnessed this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that it is a wonderful letter which no Christian genius much less one unsanctified could ever have written. I had permission now to print, provided I suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country, so I chose an Australian magazine for vehicle as being far enough out of the country and set myself to work on my article, and the ministers set the pumps going again with a letter to work the handles. But meantime Brother Page had been agitating. He had not visited the penitentiary, but had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution and accompanied it with, apparently, inquiries. He got an answer, dated four days later than that other brother's reassuring epistle, and before my article was complete it wandered into my hands. The original is before me now, and I here append it. It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description. Its Prison, Chaplain's Office, July 11, 1873 Dear Brother Page! Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. No such letter ever came to a prisoner here. All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. His name is an assumed one. I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison-bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. And so ended that little drama. My poor article went into the fire. For whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage in complexion of the game. They said, Wait! The wound is too fresh yet. All the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly, and from that time onward the four-time same old drought set in in the churches. As a rule the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. A word of explanation. Jack Hunt, the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams, Harvard graduate son of a minister, wrote the letter himself, to himself. Got it smuggled out of the prison, got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion, where he knew two things would happen. The genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired to, and the nub of it would be noticed and would have valuable effect, the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of prison. That nub is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tale of the letter, undwelled upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all. This is the nub. I hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good. I was afraid when you was bleeding you would die. Give my respects, etc. That is all there is of it. Simply touch and go, no dwelling upon it. Nevertheless, it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it, and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to affect the liberation of a poor, reformed, and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. When I, for the first time, heard that letter read nine years ago, I felt that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered, and it so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever I visited that city again I would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. Well, I visited St. Louis, but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown, for, alas, the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like Jack Hunt, was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal Williams. Birgler. Harvard graduate. Son of a clergyman. We took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company and started up the river. When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots. The wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then, and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of St. Louis. About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of Alton, Illinois, and before daylight next morning the town of Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day but a brisk railway center now, however all the towns out there are railway centers now. I could not clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel army in 61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order, at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war and had to trust to native genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. There was a railway bridge across the river here, well sprinkled with glowing lights and a very beautiful sight it was. At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with a feeling of one who returns out of a dead and gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses, saw them plainly enough, but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses which had formally stood there with perfect distinctness. It was Sunday morning and everybody was a bed yet, so I passed through the vacant streets still seeing the town as it was and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist, and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality every detail. Naturally I was a good deal moved. I said, many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven. Some I trust are in the other place. The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again, convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream, but my reflections spoiled all that, for they forced me to say, I see fifty old houses down yonder into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time. From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois is very beautiful, one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think, which is a hazardous remark to make for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor. I cannot say as to that. No matter it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again, it had suffered no change. It was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been. Whereas the faces of the others would be old and scarred with the campaigns of life and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. An old gentleman out on an early morning walk came along and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years, so he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked him various questions, first about a mate of mine in Sunday school what became of him. He graduated with honor in an eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs. He was bright and promised well when he was a boy. Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all. I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when I was a boy. He too was graduated with honors from an eastern college, but life whipped him in every battle straight along, and he died in one of the territories years ago a defeated man. I asked after another of the bright boys. He is a success, always will be, I think. I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when I was a boy. He went at something else before he got through, went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine, then to some other new thing, went away for a year, came back with a young wife, fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door, finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to Mexico, went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral. Pity for he was the best natured and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was. I named another boy. Oh, he is all right, lives here yet, has wife and children, and is prospering. Same verdict concerning other boys. I named three schoolgirls. The first two live here, are married and have children. The other is long ago dead, never married. I named with a motion one of my early sweethearts. She is all right, been married three times, buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around here and there, most everywhere's. The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple. Killed in the war. I named another boy. Well, now, his case is curious.  Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first old lawyer in the state of Missouri today, I'm a Democrat. Is that so? It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth. How do you count for it? Account for it?  Oh, there's one thing, sure.  Ship him to St. Louis. It's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it, and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of? Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people? Oh, nonsense. The people here have known him from the very cradle.   Send them to St. Louis. I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some were dead, some were gone away. Some had prospered, some had come to naught. But as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting. Prosperous. Live here yet. A town littered with their children. I asked about Miss—ahem—died in the Assain Asylum three or four years ago, never was out of it from the time she went in, and was always suffering too. Never got a shred of her mind back. If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse that some young fools might have some fun. I was a small boy at the time, and I saw all those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss—ahem—sat reading at midnight by lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a dough-face. She crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did. After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about myself. Oh! He succeeded well enough! Another case of damn fool! If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner. It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman in the beginning that my name was Smith. End of Chapter 53. Being left to myself up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett, fictitious name. It carried me back more than a generation in a moment and landed me in the midst of a time when happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes, partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory, and usually local in application. When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned on a Sunday. He fell out of an empty flatboat where he was playing. Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. He was the only boy in the village who slept that night. We others all lay awake repenting. We had not needed the information delivered from the pulpit that evening that Lem's was a case of special judgment. We knew that already. There was a ferocious thunderstorm that night and it raged continuously until near dawn. The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished. The houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant. Then the solid darkness shut down again, and a splitting peel of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world and expecting it. To me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heavens making such an uproar about Lem Hackett. Apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. Not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way. That was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. That discovery could have but one result. I should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. I knew that this would be only just and fair. I was increasing the chances against myself all the time by feeling a secret bitterness against Lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but I could not help it. This sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. Every time the lightning glared I caught my breath and judged I was gone. In my terror and misery I meanly began to suggest other boys and mention acts of theirs which were wicketer than mine and peculiarly needed punishment. And I tried to pretend to myself that I was simply doing this in a casual way and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. With deep sagacity I put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed, possibly they may repent. It is true that Jim Smith broke a window and lied about it, but maybe he did not mean any harm. And although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent, though he has never said he would. And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on Sunday once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mudcat. And maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back. And he says he did, but he didn't. Pity, but they would repent of these dreadful things. And maybe they will yet. But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though I never once suspected that, I had heedlessly left my candle burning. It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me, so I put the light out. It was a long night to me and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about. Yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory. It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake in one respect. Doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs. Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time. The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous suffering seem trifling by comparison. Things had become truly serious. I resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly. I also resolved to connect myself with a church the next day if I survived to see its sun appear. I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. I would be punctual at church and Sunday school, get the sick, carry baskets of victuals to the poor, simply to fulfill the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor, but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains. I would instruct other boys in right ways and take the resulting trouncing meekly. I would subsist entirely on tracts. I would invade the rum-shop and warn the drunkard, and finally if I escaped the fate of those who, early, become too good to live, I would go for a missionary. The storm subsided toward daybreak and I dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to them hack it for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster, my own loss. But when I rose refreshed by and by and found that those other boys were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm, that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account and nobody's else. The world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. I was a little subdued during that day, and perhaps the next. After that my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. That storm came about three weeks later, and it was the most unaccountable one to me that I had ever experienced, for on the afternoon of that day Dutchy was drowned. Dutchy belonged to our Sunday school. He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain. But he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village by reciting three thousand verses of scripture without missing a word. Then he went off the very next day and got drowned. Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the Coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and seeing who could stay under longest. We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count. Be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him. Treacherous winks were exchanged and all said, All right, Dutchy, go ahead, we'll play fair. Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant and nobody there to applaud. They were so full of laugh, with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briars said with surprise, Why, he hasn't come up yet. The laughing stopped. Boys, it's a splendid dive, said one. Never mind that, said another. The joke on him is all the better for it. There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. Before long the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still, there was no movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. We all glided out silently and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the river. Somebody must go down and see. Yes, that was plain, but nobody wanted that grisly task. Draw straws, so we did, with hands which shook so that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop-pulls, and presently I grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response. And if it had, I should not have known it. I let it go with such a frightened suddenness. The boy had been caught among the hoop-pulls and entangled there helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything. We did not know what to do, so we did nothing, except that the smaller lads cried piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybodies that came handy, and getting them wrong side out and upside down as a rule. Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. We had a more important thing to attend to. We all flew home and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. The night presently closed down, then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed. I could not understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain. If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else? Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Duccy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high. The lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me, for it convinced me that if Duccy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try. Nevertheless, I did turn it over. A highly educated fear compelled me to do that, but succeeding bays of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month I had so drifted backward that again I was as lost and comfortable as ever. Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind, so I got me back into the present and went down the hill. On my way through town to the hotel I saw the house which was my home when I was a boy. At present rates the people who now occupy it are of no more value than I am, but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars a piece. They are colored folk. After breakfast I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the Sunday schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model, though I do not remember as to that now. By the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the Old Ship of Zion, which I had attended as a Sunday school scholar, and I found the locality easily enough, but not the old church. It was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. The pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time. Consequently they did not resemble their ancestors, and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. Still I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if I had been a girl I would have cried, for they were the offspring and represented and occupied the places of boys and girls, some of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me, for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by, and Lord, were be they now. I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill, but a bald, summited superintendent who had been a toe-headed Sunday school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine, and I was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger Sunday school I found myself in the rear of the assemblage, so I was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. On the spur of the moment I could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when I was a pupil there, and I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh, young comeliness not matchable in another Sunday school of the same size. As I talked merely to get a chance to inspect, and as I strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, I judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and I did so. If the model boy was in either of these Sunday schools I did not see him. The model boy of my time, we never had but the one, was perfect. Perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness, but at bottom he was a prig, and as for the contents of his skull they could have changed place for the contents of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life. CHAPTER 55 A Vendetta and Other Things During my three days stay in the town I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy, for in my dreams the faces were all young again and looked as they had looked in the old times, but I went to bed a hundred years old every night. For meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now. Of course I suffered some surprises along at first before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all, but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind, sometimes their granddaughters. When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it. But if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, how can a little girl be a grandmother? It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that, while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still in that matter. I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly, but their wives had grown old. These were good women. It is very wearing to be good. There was a saddler whom I wished to see, but he was gone. Dead these many years, they said. Once or twice a day the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went, and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. Everybody knew also that John Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat, or any freight either, and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this. Still it made no difference to him. He liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town in derision as Stavely's Landing. Stavely was one of my earliest admirations. I envied him his rush of imaginary business and the display he was able to make of it before strangers as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar, but I did not know that. I believed everything he said. He was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was planning a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh, and occasionally mutter broken sentences, confused and not intelligible, but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good. One was, O God, it is his blood! I sat on the tool-chast and humbly and shudderingly admired him, for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low voice, My little friend, can you keep a secret? I eagerly said I could. A dark and dreadful one? I satisfied him on that point.  He cautioned me once more to be as silent as the grave. Then he told me he was a red-handed murderer. He put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said, Look! With these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings. The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He left generalizing and went into details, began with his first murder, described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion, then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had always done his murders with a bowie knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back.  In fact I spent the summer with him, all of which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring in the way of horror into each successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places, everything. This, by and by, enabled me to note two things. That he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch. The destruction of the Lynch's went serenely on Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty, and more to be heard from yet. Then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being, but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one too fair for earth, and she had reciprocated with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature. But he had a rival, a base hireling named Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would die his hands in her heart's best blood. The carpenter, innocent and happy in love's young dream, gave no weight to the threat, but led his golden haired darling to the altar, and there the two were made one.  And what did the husband do? He plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of Lynch. That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynch's and slaughtering them from that day to this, twenty years. He had always used that same consecrated knife. With it he had murdered his long array of Lynch's, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark, a cross, deeply incised, said he, the cross of the mysterious avenger is known in Europe, in America, in China, in Siam, in the tropics, in the polar seas, in the deserts of Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe a Lynch has penetrated there has the mysterious cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, It is his mark, he has been here. You have heard of the mysterious avenger.  But beware, breathe not a word to any soul, be silent and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse. On its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, He has been here. It is the mysterious avenger's mark. You will come here, but I shall have vanished. You will see me no more."  However, we had a Lynch living in the town, and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty, to get some sleep for myself. So at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him under strict secrecy. I advised him to fly, and certainly expected him to do it, but he laughed at me, and he did not stop there. He led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg, then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed his Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished. But it was all wasted upon me. He was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself. I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent, for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet. The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is no longer a village, it is a city, with a mayor and a council and waterworks, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the West and South, where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a noob depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no specialty and no commercial grandeur. The daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hat full of freight. But now a huge commerce in Lumber has grown up, and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now. Bear Creek, so-called perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears, is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy. But not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so wracked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed, by scientists, to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake. There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had no time. In my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable, and it was said to be a common thing for the base order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. End of Chapter 55 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPE By Mark Twain Chapter 56 A Question of Law The slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek, and so is the small jail, or Calibus, which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the Calibus? Observe now how history becomes defiled through laps of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the Calibus, but died a natural death in a tan vat of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The Calibus victim was not a citizen. He was a poor stranger, a harmless, whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else. I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it.  He got neither matches nor courtesy. On the contrary, a troupe of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted. But at last some appeal which the Wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hide me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unboyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward the man was arrested and locked up in the Calibus by the Marshal, large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course, I, with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously. He had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women and children stood mass together transfixed with horror and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars and tugging frantically at them and screaming for help stood the tramp. He seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That Marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into while cheering and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong. They did not yield. It was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead, and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. I saw that face so situated every night for a long time afterward, and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they did themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter I was all ears in a moment and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected. And so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, how so ever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that murder will out. For a boy of ten years I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing, the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my bedmate, my younger brother, sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. I said, What is the matter? You talk so much I can't sleep. I came to a sitting posture in an instant with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. What did I say? Quick, out with it. What did I say? Nothing much. It's a lie. You know everything. Everything about what? You know well enough about that. About what? I don't know what you were talking about.  But anyway you're awake. And I'll get to sleep while I've got a chance. He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know? What a distress is this uncertainty. But by and by I evolved an idea. I would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him up and said, Suppose a man should come to you drunk. This is foolish. I never get drunk.  I mean the man.  And how could you load a tomahawk? I don't mean the tomahawk and I didn't say the tomahawk. I said the pistol. Now don't you keep breaking in that way because this is serious. There's been a man killed. What? In this town? Yes, in this town. Well, go on. I won't say a single word. Well then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it because it was loaded and he went off and shot himself with that pistol, fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident being drunk. Well, would it be murder? No. Suicide. No. No, I don't mean his act. I mean yours. Would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol? After deep thought came this answer. Well, I should think I was guilty of something, maybe murder. Yes, probably murder, but I don't quite know. This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict. I should have to set out the real case. There seemed to be no other way. But I would do it cautiously and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. I said, I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the Calaboose? No. Have you the least idea? Not the least.  Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the Calaboose with those very matches and burnt himself up. Is that so? Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think? Let me see. The man was drunk? Yes, he was drunk. Very drunk? Yes. And the boy knew it? Yes, he knew it. There was long pause, then came this heavy verdict. If the man was drunk and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man, this is certain. Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body and I seem to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say next. I believed I knew what it would be and I was right. He said, I know the boy. I had nothing to say, so I said nothing. I simply shuddered, and then he added, Yes. Before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew perfectly well who the boy was. It was Ben Koontz. I came out with my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with admiration, Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?  I said to myself, How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be cultivated. My brother rattled innocently on. When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about matches which I couldn't make anything out of. But just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the Calaboose and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Koontz two or three times. So I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben that burnt that man up. I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked, Are you going to give him up to the law? No, I said. I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right. But if he stops where he is in reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him. How good you are! Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this. And now my burden being shifted to other shoulders my tears soon faded away. The day before we left Hannibal a curious thing fell under my notice. The surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned it from one of the most unustentatious of men, the colored coachman of a friend of mine who lives three miles from town. He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 p.m. and drive me out. But he missed it considerably, did not arrive till 10. He excused himself by saying, The time is most an hour and a half slower in the country and what it is in the town. You'll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, and fetches up the right plumb in the middle of the sermon. Difference in the time. A body can't make no calculations about it. I had lost two hours and a half, but I had learned a fact worth four. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Chapter 57 An Archangel From St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical, 19th century populations. The people don't dream they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. Quincy is a notable example, a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city, and now as formerly interested in art, letters, and other high things. But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked City to its name in the very beginning with full confidence, but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City 35 years ago it contained one street and nearly or quite six houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage. It was situated in a flat mud-bottom below High Watermark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town, and these she has yet—broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fairgrounds, a well-kept park, and many attractive drives—library, reading rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand courthouse with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is 30,000. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing of many sorts is done on a great scale. LaGrange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria, was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. KeaCook was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857, an extraordinary year there in real estate matters. The boom was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold, except widows and preachers. They always hold on, and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was saleable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. The town has a population of 15,000 now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details for which we were sorry, for KeaCook has the reputation of being a beautiful city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced not retrograded in that respect. A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. This is the canal over the rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions. After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. KeaCook, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing place of that erratic genius Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once, but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him. He began life poor and without education, but he educated himself on the curb stones of KeaCook. He would sit down on a curb stone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position, except to draw in his knees now and then, to let a drape pass unobstructed. And when his book was finished, its contents, however obstruous, had been burnt into his memory and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast horde of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a wharf-rats, except that they were ragged-er, more ill-assorted and inharmonious, and therefore more extravagantly picturesque, and several layers dirtier. Nobody could infer the mastermind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. He was an orator, by nature in the first place and later by the training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvas his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. In 1862 a son of Kiercook's late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean. The war-feeling was running high in Kiercook in 61, and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant. The distinguished stranger had failed to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point the wide empty carpetless stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. It was the Scarecrow Dean, in foxy shoes, down at the heels, socks of odd colors, also down, damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a whirl too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle, an unbuttoned vest also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband, shirt bosom open, long black handkerchief wound round and round the neck like a bandage. Bob tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected. Small, stiff-brimmed soldier cap hung on a corner of the bump of whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage, and with sedate and measured step down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave started, laughter this time. It was followed by another, then a third, this last one boisterous. And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak with deliberation. Nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. He followed it quick and fast with other telling things, warmed to his work, and began to pour his words out instead of dripping them. Grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder. And now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on. Unwound his black bandage, and cast it away, still thundering. Presently discarded the bob-tailed coat, and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time, finally flung the vest after the coat, and then, for an untimed period stood there, like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. When Dean came, said Claggett, the people thought he was an escaped lunatic. But when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel. Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill-city, and also a beautiful one. Unquestionably so, a fine and flourishing city with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too, for the moment, for a most sobering bill was pending, a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the state of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race except water. This measure was approved by all the rational people in the state, but not by the bench of judges. Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government, including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. In Burlington, as in all these upper river towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera house has lately been built there, which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theatres in cities of Burlington's size. We had no time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. I lived there a while many years ago, but the place now had a different unfamiliar look, so I suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know. In fact, I know it has, for I remember it as a small place which it isn't now, but I remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields one Sunday and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the devil. I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family I had met, but that did not satisfy him. He wouldn't have any half-measures. I must say that he was the sole and only son of the devil. He wetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worthwhile to make trouble about a little thing like that, so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. Shortly afterward he went to visit his father, and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet. And I remember Muscatine, still more pleasantly, for its summer sunsets. I have never seen any on either side of the ocean that equalled them. They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintiness and delicacies of the opal all the way up through cumulative intensities to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. All the upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is the true sunset land. I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. I do not know.