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<h2> Chapter 53 </h2>
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<h3> My Boyhood's Home </h3>
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<p>WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul
Packet Company, and started up the river.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with
glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good
deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil
refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other
place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again—convinced
me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an
unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced
me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which I could
enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I
noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at
that time.'</p>
<p>From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and
wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful—one of
the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous
remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and
St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that
my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; I
cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and
it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet
again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and
gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be
old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs
and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit.</p>
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<p>An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we
discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not
remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years. So
he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked him
various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school—what
became of him?</p>
<p>'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the
world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory
years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.'</p>
<p>'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.'</p>
<p>'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.'</p>
<p>I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school
when I was a boy.</p>
<p>'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college; but life
whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the
Territories, years ago, a defeated man.'</p>
<p>I asked after another of the bright boys.</p>
<p>'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.'</p>
<p>I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of
the professions when I was a boy.</p>
<p>'He went at something else before he got through—went from medicine
to law, or from law to medicine—then to some other new thing; went
away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to
gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to
her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally
died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend
the funeral.'</p>
<p>'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young
fellow that ever was.'</p>
<p>I named another boy.</p>
<p>'Oh, he is all right. Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is
prospering.'</p>
<p>Same verdict concerning other boys.</p>
<p>I named three school-girls.</p>
<p>'The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long
ago dead—never married.'</p>
<p>I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts.</p>
<p>'She is all right. Been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced
from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out
in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around here and there,
most everywheres.'</p>
<p>The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple—</p>
<p>'Killed in the war.'</p>
<p>I named another boy.</p>
<p>'Well, now, his case is curious! There wasn't a human being in this town
but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a
stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it.
Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri
to-day, I'm a Democrat!'</p>
<p>'Is that so?'</p>
<p>'It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth.'</p>
<p>'How do you account for it?'</p>
<p>'Account for it? There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you
send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned
fool they'll never find it out. There's one thing sure—if I had a
damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis—
it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when
you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't
it just bang anything you ever heard of?'</p>
<p>'Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal
people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people.'</p>
<p>'Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle—
they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have
known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize
on, take my advice—send them to St. Louis.'</p>
<p>I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some were
dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught;
but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting:</p>
<p>'Prosperous—live here yet—town littered with their children.'</p>
<p>I asked about Miss ——.</p>
<p>Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago—never was out of
it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a
shred of her mind back.'</p>
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<p>If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years
in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small
boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into
the room where Miss —— sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The
girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept
behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and
screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the
fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people
believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did.</p>
<p>After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally
inquired about <i>myself</i>:</p>
<p>'Oh, he succeeded well enough—another case of damned fool. If they'd
sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.'</p>
<p>It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told
this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith.</p>
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