lank cadaver, old oil-derrick out of a job–who is that?” “Well, now,”
Mr. Dana said, “you don’t want to meddle with him; you had better keep
quiet; just keep quiet, because that’s a bad man. Talk! He was born to
talk. Don’t let him get out with you; he’ll skin you.” I said, “I have
been skinned, skinned, and skinned for years, there is nothing left.”
He said, “Oh, you’ll find there is; that man is the very seed and
inspiration of that proverb which says, ‘No matter how close you skin an
onion, a clever man can always peel it again.'” Well, I reflected and
I quieted down. That would never occur to Tom Reed. He’s got no
discretion. Well, MacVeagh is just the same man; he hasn’t changed a bit
in all those years; he has been peeling Mr. Mitchell lately. That’s the
kind of man he is.
Mr. Howells–that poem of his is admirable; that’s the way to treat a
person. Howells has a peculiar gift for seeing the merits of people,
and he has always exhibited them in my favor. Howells has never written
anything about me that I couldn’t read six or seven times a day; he is
always just and always fair; he has written more appreciatively of me
than any one in this world, and published it in the North American
Review. He did me the justice to say that my intentions–he italicized
that–that my intentions were always good, that I wounded people’s
conventions rather than their convictions. Now, I wouldn’t want anything
handsomer than that said of me. I would rather wait, with anything harsh
I might have to say, till the convictions become conventions. Bangs has
traced me all the way down. He can’t find that honest man, but I will
look for him in the looking-glass when I get home. It was intimated by
the Colonel that it is New England that makes New York and builds up this
country and makes it great, overlooking the fact that there’s a lot of
people here who came from elsewhere, like John Hay from away out West,
and Howells from Ohio, and St. Clair McKelway and me from Missouri, and
we are doing what we can to build up New York a little-elevate it. Why,
when I was living in that village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of
the Mississippi, and Hay up in the town of Warsaw, also on the banks of
the Mississippi River it is an emotional bit of the Mississippi, and when
it is low water you have to climb up to it on a ladder, and when it
floods you have to hunt for it; with a deep-sea lead–but it is a great
and beautiful country. In that old time it was a paradise for
simplicity–it was a simple, simple life, cheap but comfortable, and full
of sweetness, and there was nothing of this rage of modern civilization
there at all. It was a delectable land. I went out there last June,
and I met in that town of Hannibal a schoolmate of mine, John Briggs,
whom I had not seen for more than fifty years. I tell you, that was a
meeting! That pal whom I had known as a little boy long ago, and knew
now as a stately man three or four inches over six feet and browned by
exposure to many climes, he was back there to see that old place again.
We spent a whole afternoon going about here and there and yonder, and
hunting up the scenes and talking of the crimes which we had committed so
long ago. It was a heartbreaking delight, full of pathos, laughter, and
tears, all mixed together; and we called the roll of the boys and girls
that we picnicked and sweethearted with so many years ago, and there were
hardly half a dozen of them left; the rest were in their graves; and we
went up there on the summit of that hill, a treasured place in my memory,
the summit of Holiday’s Hill, and looked out again over that magnificent
panorama of the Mississippi River, sweeping along league after league, a
level green paradise on one side, and retreating capes and promontories