Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0141/01413.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 10KB | 218 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01413}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter LIII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{boy
st
louis
years
town
ago
young
another
first
river}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter LIII

My Boyhood Home

     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 has 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 the
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 formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness.

     It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed 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 has been, 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 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 a wife and children, and is
prospering."

     Same verdict concerning other boys.

     I named three school-girls.

     "The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is
long ago dead - never married."

     I named, with emotion, 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 everywheres."

     The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple:

     "Killed in the war."

     I named another boy.

     "Well now, his case is curious!  There wasn't a human being in this town
but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid
ass, as you may say.  Everybody knew it, and everybody said it.  Well, if that
very boy isn't the first lawyer in the state of Missouri to-day, I'm a
Democrat!"

     "Is that so?"

     "It's actually so.  I'm telling you the truth."

     "How do you account for it?"

     "Account for it?  There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you
send a d - d fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a d - d fool,
they'll never find it out.  There's one thing sure - if I had a d - d fool I
should know what to do with him: 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 -
they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have
known him.  No; if you have got any d - d fools that you want to realize on,
take my advice - 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 - town littered with their children."

     I asked about Miss - .

     "Died in the insane 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 those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the
room where Miss - sat reading at midnight by a lamp.  The girl at the head of
the file wore a shroud and a doughface; 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 d - d 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.