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 young 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 gray-beards 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 Dickason, 408
Rock Street, at 2.30 o’clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years.
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 Dickason 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. Dickason 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 I can still see
her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-
linen frock. She was crying. What it was about, I have 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 gray-heads 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.
Footnotes:
{1} Four fathoms–twenty-four feet.
{2} From chapter XIII of “The Shakespeare Problem Restated.”