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 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 ****ason, 408 Rock Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72years.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 ****ason 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.****ason 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 Ican still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-linen frock.She was crying.What it was about Ihave 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.
End A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY
Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri--a village; time, 1845.La Bourboule-les-Bains, France --a village; time, the end of June, 1894.I was in the one village in that early time; I am in the other now.These times and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long ago.
Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic was taken by an Italian assassin.Last night a mob surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the "Marseillaise," and pelting our windows with sticks and stones;for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then driven out of the village.Everybody in the hotel remained up until far into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror which one reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians and by French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival, with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to rearrange plans--followed by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear than even the active siege and the noise.The landlord and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at last the mob was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in peace.Today four of the ringleaders have been sentenced to heavy punishment of a public sort--and are become local heroes, by consequence.
That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian village half a century ago.The mistake was repeated and repeated--just as France is doing in these later months.
In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in a humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled this name wrong.Fifty years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been passing through during the past two or three years, in the matter of periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.
In several details the parallels are quaintly exact.In that day, for a man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman.
For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right mind.For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years ago, was to proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right mind.