of the west and south–where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk
are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them.
The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now,
and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars.
In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur;
the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish,
and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge
commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce
is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now.
Bear Creek–so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly
bare of bears–is hidden out of sight now, under islands and
continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it.
I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be
drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy;
but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in.
It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day.
I remember one summer when everybody in town had this
disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all
the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt.
The chasm or gorge between Lover’s Leap and the hill west of it
is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action.
This is a mistake.
There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs.
I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person
who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen.
The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with
alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave.
The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing
for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it
and comment upon it.
Chapter 56
A Question of Law
THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is
the small jail (or ‘calaboose’) which once stood in its neighborhood.
A citizen asked, ‘Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard,
was burned to death in the calaboose?’
Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time
and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not
burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat,
of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion.
When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for
Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen;
he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp.
I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it,
in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering
about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth,
and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy;
on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him
around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him.
I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made
for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his
forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame
and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away
and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed,
heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit.
An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up
in the calaboose by the marshal–large name for a constable,
but that was his title. At two in the morning, the church bells rang
for fire, and everybody turned out, of course–I with the rest.
The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw
bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught.
When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children