atfordians who were not Stratfordians of
Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had learned had come
to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and what they had
learned was not claimed as FACT, but only as legend--dim and fading and
indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering rank, and not worth
remembering either as history or fiction.

Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who had
spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where he was
born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and leave that
village voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly voiceless., utterly
gossipless? And permanently so? I don't believe it has happened in any
case except Shakespeare's. And couldn't and wouldn't have happened
in his case if he had been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his
death.

When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will not
be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite likely to
result, most likely to result, indeed substantially SURE to result in
the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the human race. Like
me.

My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the
banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I entered
school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to another in
the village during nine and a half years. Then my father died, leaving
his family in exceedingly straitened circumstances; wherefore my
book-education came to a standstill forever, and I became a printer's
apprentice, on board and clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a
hymn-book in place of them. This for summer wear, probably. I lived in
Hannibal fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according
to the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. I
never lived there afterward. Four years later I became a "cub" on a
Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and
after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the U.S. inspectors
rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings and decided
that I knew every inch of the Mississippi--thirteen hundred miles--in
the dark and in the day--as well as a baby knows the way to its mother's
paps day or night. So they licensed me as a pilot--knighted me, so to
speak--and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of
the United States Government.

Now then. Shakespeare d