| At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal,
Missouri, where my boyhood was spent . . . The only notion of the town that
remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first
quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear
and vivid to me as a photograph.
I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. . . I passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is . . . and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. . . |
|
 "Sunday afternoon with John Briggs he walked over Holliday's Hill." Illustration from ST. NICHOLAS, September 1916 |
The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream . . . From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi it was satisfyingly beautiful to me. . . it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. |
During my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression
that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked
as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old,
every night--for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now.
- passages from Life on the Mississippi
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