as a
few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of
the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him
famous. His name is associated with every old building that is torn
down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing
city, and with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any
possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove
into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island, or Mark
Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any
opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.

So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school with Mark
or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored
with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and
condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to
be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen
to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Becky 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 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 graybeards gather about the fires and begin with,
"I've heard father tell," or possibly, "Once when I." The Mrs. Clemens
referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.

And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date twenty days
ago:

Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason, 408 Rock
Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years. The deceased
was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of the famous characters in Mark
Twain's TOM SAWYER. She had been a member of the Dickason family--the
housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years, and was a highly respected
lady. For the past eight years she