Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/409

 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

nibal tether had become too short for him. He disappeared from home and wandered from one Eastern printing-office to another. He saw the World s Fair at New York, and other marvels, and supported himself by setting type. At the end of this Wanderjahr, financial stress drove him back to his family. He lived at St. Louis, Mus- catine, and Keokuk until 1857, when he induced the great Horace Bixby to teach him the mystery of steamboat - piloting. The charm of all this warm, indolent existence in &quot;the sleepy river towns has colored his whole subsequent life. In Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and Pudd nhead Wilson, every phase of that van ished estate is lovingly dwelt upon.

Native character will always make itself felt, but one may wonder whether Mark Twain s humor would have developed in quite so sympathetic and buoyant a vein if he had been brought up in Ecclefechan instead of in Hannibal, and whether Carlyle might not have been a little more human if he had spent his boyhood in Hannibal instead of in Ecclefechan.

A Mississippi pilot in the later fifties was a per sonage of imposing grandeur. He was a miracle of attainments; he was the absolute master of his boat while it was under way, and just before his fall he commanded a salary precisely equal to that earned at that time by the Vice-President of the United States or a Justice of the Supreme Court. The best proof of the superlative majesty and desira bility of his position is the fact that Samuel Clemens deliberately subjected himself to the incredible labor

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