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Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son, Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him famous. His name is associated with every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson’s Island, or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.
So it has happened that the “old timers” who went to school with Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Becky and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad, after all. So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to get a “Mark Twain” story, all incidents being viewed in the light of his present fame, until the volume of “Twainiana” is already considerable and growing in proportion as the “old timers” drop away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their descendants. With some seventy-three years young and living in a villa instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his “works” that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, “I’ve heard father tell,” or possibly, “Once when I.” The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother—_was_ my mother.
And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date twenty days ago:
Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason, 408 Rock Street, at 2.30 o’clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years. The deceased was a sister of “Huckleberry Finn,” one of the famous characters in Mark Twain’s _Tom Sawyer_. She had been a member of the Dickason family—the housekeeper— for nearly forty-five years, and was a highly respected lady. For the past eight years she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by Mr. Dickason and his family as if she had been a near relative. She was a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.
I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago. She was at that time nine years old, and I was about eleven. I remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-linen frock. She was crying. What it was about I have long ago forgotten. But it was the tears that preserved the picture for me, no doubt. She was a good child, I can say that for her. She knew me nearly seventy years ago. Did she forget me, in the course of time? I think not. If she had lived in Stratford in Shakespeare’s time, would she have forgotten him? Yes. For he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and there wouldn’t be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a week.
“Injun Joe,” “Jimmy Finn,” and “General Gaines” were prominent and very intemperate ne’er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations ago. Plenty of grayheads there remember them to this day, and can tell you about them. Isn’t it curious that two “town drunkards” and one half-breed loafer should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times greater and several hundred times more particularized in the matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?
MARK TWAIN.
THE END