June 1 Sunday – In Hannibal, Mo. Sam wrote to Dr. Everett Gill of Hannibal.
I find it too formidable! I should not be able to sit in the pulpit on Sunday & feel that I was doing a right & decorous thing; I should be under my own censure all the time. Therefore I shall sit where any sinner may sit without offence, & where all sinners are welcome. I shall be comfortable there, & free of self-reproaches [MTP].
Sorrentino lists a lay sermon Sam gave on “The Gospel of Good Cheer” at the Baptist Church [21]. Paine writes of Sam’s activities on this day:
On Sunday morning Col. John Robards [RoBards] escorted him to the various churches and Sunday-schools. They were all new churches to Samuel Clemens, but he pretended not to recognize this fact. In each one he was asked to speak a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old home Sunday- school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings. At one place he told a moral story. He said:
Little boys and girls, I want to tell you a story which illustrates the value of perseverance—of sticking to your work, as it were. It is a story very proper for a Sunday-school. When I was a little boy in Hannibal I used to play a good deal up here on Holliday’s Hill, which of course you all know. John Briggs and I layed up there. I don’t suppose there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is not to be expected. Little boys in those days were ‘most always good little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was better than it is now, but never mind that. Well, once upon a time, on Holliday’s Hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for a blast. He sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast. Then he put in the powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched him. He went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller. First he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. John Briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just persevering, you see, and sticking to his work. Little boys and girls, that’s the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on Holliday’s Hill. Of course you won’t always be appreciated. He wasn’t. His employer was a hard man, and on Saturday night when he paid him he docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air—but never mind, he had his reward.
He told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the Sunday-school was in a storm of enjoyment when he finished. There still remains a doubt in Hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its acceptability.
That Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday’s Hill—the Cardiff Hill of Tom Sawyer. It was just such a Sunday as that one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a cooper-shop. They calculated that nearly three thousand Sundays had passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in the sun. Standing there together and looking across to the low -lying Illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to Lover’s Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam Clemens said:
“John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw. Down there by the island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there’s where the steamboat sank. Down there on Lover’s Leap is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. None of them went that night, but I suppose most of them have gone now.
John Briggs said:
“Sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man Price and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how we made up our minds that we’d catch that nigger and drown him?”
They came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had so nearly brought them to grief. Sam Clemens said:
“John, if we had killed that man we’d have had a dead nigger on our hands without a cent to pay for him.”
And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove along the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while that his career was about to close.
“Once, near the shore, I thought I would let down,” he said, “but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally my knees struck the sand and I crawled out. That was the closest call I ever had.”
They drove by the place where the haunted house had stood. They drank from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had always drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and lingeringly that most beautiful of all our possessions, the past.
“Sam,” said John, when they parted, “this is probably the last time we shall meet on this earth. God bless you. Perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship.”
“John,” was the answer, “this day has been worth thousands of dollars to me. We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now.
“Good-by, John. I’ll try to meet you—somewhere” [MTB 1168-71].
Powers writes of Sam’s departure from Hannibal on his way to Columbia, Mo. by train:
The next morning, a Sunday, he walked with a Baptist minister ahead of a throng to the railroad station, where he posed for photographers in his gray suit and homburg, a spray of flowers in his fist. As he strolled in the sunlight, an ancient specter materialized from the depths of the crowd…. It was deaf Tom Nash, who shrieked out: “Same damned fools, Sam!” [MT A Life 613].
Sam’s notebook: indicated that he intended to use Edwin Ransford’s line “In the Days When We Went
Gypsying” in his next Huck and Tom Story [Gribben 569: NB 45 TS 15]. Sam also entered: “Lease (5 months) of the York Harbor house begins / Rent, $600 for the 5 months. / Two payments: / July 1, $300 / Sept. 1, 300” [ibid].
Livy’s diary: “Mr Harriott (Clara Morris’ husband, Frederick[)] called. Dr Parry & Miss Grace Darling John
Howells was here for tea” [MTP: DV161].
Hastings MacAdam’s article in the St. Louis Republic, “Mark Twain Visits His Old Sweetheart,” ran on p. 1, sec. 3 [MTCI 444-8].
Dial Magazine, p. 390, ran a brief review of “A Double Barrelled Detective Story.” “The story, which is slight, promises well in the opening chapters, but it may be said not to be worked out, and leaves the reader disappointed” [Tenney: “A Reference Guide Third Annual Supplement,” American Literary Realism, Autumn 1979 p. 187].
June 1 ca. – In Hannibal, Mo. Sam wrote to an unidentified person. “I can’t come, too old to travel and eat. The whole thing is wrong anyway. When I was eighteen years old and lived in Hannibal and could swipe up everything on the table, you didn’t invite me to your banquets” [MTP].