Chapter 53

Chapter 53
My Boyhood's 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 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 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