Chapter 6 - Page 2

rank, and not worth remembering
either as history or fiction.

Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who
had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where
he was born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and
leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly
voiceless, utterly gossipless? And permanently so? I don't
believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's. And
couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been
regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.

When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will
not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite
likely to result, most likely to result, indeed substantially SURE
to result in the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the
human race. Like me.

My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the
banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I
entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to
another in the village during nine and a half years. Then my
father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened
circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill
forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and clothes,
and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place of them.
This for summer wear, probably. I lived in Hannibal fifteen and a
half years, altogether, then ran away, according to the custom of
persons who are intending to become celebrated. I never lived
there afterward. Four years later I became a "cub" on a
Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and
after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the U. S.
inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings
and decided that I knew every inch of the Mississippi--thirteen
hundred miles--in the dark and in the day--as well as a baby knows
the way to its mother's paps day or night. So they licensed me as
a pilot--knighted me, so to speak--and I rose up clothed with
authority, a responsible servant of the United States government.

Now then. Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two. He had
lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about that. He
died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books).
Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it;
and for sixty years afterward no townsman remembered to say
anything about him or about his life in Stratford. When the
inquirer came at last he got but one fact--no, LEGEND--and got that
one at second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor,
and didn't claim copyright in it as a production of his own. He