Page:1909. Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography.djvu/161

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD? "humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Beckey and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad after all. So 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.'" 147