n't that attract any attention?"

Of course to continue such a dialogue would have been tedious and
unprofitable, and I let it go, and took the consequences.

That was about 1849. Tom Nash was a boy of my own age--the postmaster's
son. The Mississippi was frozen across, and he and I went skating one
night, probably without permission. I cannot see why we should go
skating in the night unless without permission, for there could be no
considerable amusement to be gotten out of skating at night if nobody
was going to object to it. About midnight, when we were more than half a
mile out toward the Illinois shore, we heard some ominous rumbling and
grinding and crashing going on between us and the home side of the
river, and we knew what it meant--the ice was breaking up. We started
for home, pretty badly scared. We flew along at full speed whenever the
moonlight sifting down between the clouds enabled us to tell which was
ice and which was water. In the pauses we waited; started again whenever
there was a good bridge of ice; paused again when we came to naked water
and waited in distress until a floating vast cake should bridge that
place. It took us an hour to make the trip--a trip which we made in a
misery of apprehension all the time. But at last we arrived within a
very brief distance of the shore. We waited again; there was another
place that needed bridging. All about us the ice was plunging and
grinding along and piling itself up in mountains on the shore, and the
dangers were increasing, not diminishing. We grew very impatient to get
to solid ground, so we started too early and went springing from cake to
cake. Tom made a miscalculation, and fell short. He got a bitter bath,
but he was so close to shore that he only had to swim a stroke or
two--then his feet struck hard bottom and he crawled out. I arrived a
little later, without accident. We had been in a drenching perspiration,
and Tom's bath was a disaster for him. He took to his bed sick, and had
a procession of diseases. The closing one was scarlet-fever, and he came
out of it stone deaf. Within a year or two speech departed, of course.
But some years later he was taught to talk, after a fashion--one
couldn't always make out what it was he was trying to say. Of course he
could not modulate his voice, since he couldn't hear himself talk. When
he supposed he was talking low and confidentially, you could hear him in
Illinois.

Four years ago (1902) I was invited