Clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy
from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to
his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials.

It was a long, successful trip that I made, and it was undertaken none
too soon. John Briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the
valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable
afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in
the cave and on Holliday's Hill. I think it was six weeks later that he
died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not
reach the end of the year. Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912),
journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to
see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve
Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat
up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told
old tales and adventures. When I left he said:

"Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've
loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die. This is the last
word I'll ever send to him." Jim Gillis, down in Sonora, was already
lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late,
though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner,
and to send back a parting word.

I returned by way of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, for I wished
to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding
genius, Horace Bixby,--[He died August 2, 1912, at the age of 86]--still
alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his
headquarters at St. Louis.

Coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still
exist, I noticed in a paper which came aboard that Mark Twain was to
receive from Oxford University the literary doctor's degree. There had
been no hint of this when I came away, and it seemed rather too sudden
and too good to be true. That the little barefoot lad that had played
along the river-banks at Hannibal, and received such meager advantages in
the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a
craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world's greatest
institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for
achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be
likely to happen outside of a fairy tale.

Returning to New York, I r