Chapter 57 - Page 2

progress there in my day is finished now.
This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long,
three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep.
Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department
usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct.
The work cost four or five millions.

After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up
the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional
loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.
I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of
when I lived there. This is what was said of him--

He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--
on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone
with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce
and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his
studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw
in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed;
and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse,
had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession.
In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning,
and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual
hand on it whenever it was wanted.

His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that
they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore
more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.
Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from
the edifice itself.

He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training
of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name was
a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.
His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does
not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen,
Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean--

The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great
mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum.
A distinguished stranger was to address the house.
After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with
sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--
the distinguished stranger had failed to connect.
The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious.
About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone,
explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him,
rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make
for the stage and save his country.

Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling