ife of the modern city. He made a
trip with Bixby in a tug to the Warmouth plantation, and they reviewed
old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will.
Altogether the New Orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by
a newspaper notice of the death, in Edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle
and beloved Dr. Brown.

Clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the Baton Rouge. Bixby
had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches
himself, so that with "Sam Clemens" in the pilot-house with him, it was
wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the
fifties.

"Sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always
did," said Bixby to the writer, recalling the time. "I was sorry I
had to stay at the wheel so much. I wanted to have more time with Sam
without thinking of the river at all. Sam was sorry, too, from what he
wrote after he got home."

Bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. It was a tender,
heart-spoken letter:

I didn't see half enough of you. It was a sore disappointment.
Osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--I
expected to have you with me all the time. Altogether, the most
pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in St.
Louis, and you were your old natural self again. Twenty years have
not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your
loveliness.

Said Bixby: "When we arrived in St. Louis we came to the Planters'
Hotel; to this very table where you and I are sitting now, and we had
a couple of hot Scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a
good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. After he returned
to New York he sent for my picture. He wanted to use it in his book."

At St. Louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the
Mississippi toward St. Paul. Clemens laid off three days at Hannibal.

Delightful days [he wrote home]. Loitering around all day long,
examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were
boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago. I spent my nights
with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and
beautiful house. They were children with me, and afterward schoolmates.
That world which I knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and
melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire
has gone out of its eyes, the spring from it