Turning into Bird Street and passing the old Pavey Hotel, we came upon the "Mark Twain House," a tiny box of a cottage, its sagging front so taken up with five windows and a door that there is barely room for the little bronze plaque which marks the place. At one side is an alley running back to the house of Huckleberry Finn, on the next street (Huck, as Paine tells us, was really a boy named Tom Blankenship), and in that alley stood the historic fence which young Sam Clemens cajoled the other boys into whitewashing for him, as related in "Tom Sawyer."
Inside the house there is little to be seen. It is occupied now by a custodian who sells souvenir post cards, and has but few Mark Twain relics to show--some photographs and autographs; nothing of importance. But, despite that, I got a real sensation as I stood in the little parlor, hardly larger than a good-sized closet, and realized that in that miserable shanty grew up the wild, barefoot boy who has since been called "the greatest Missourian" and "America's greatest literary man," and that in and about that place he gathered the impressions and had the adventures which, at the time, he himself never dreamed would be made by him into books--much less books that would be known as classics.
In the front room of the cottage a memorial tablet is to be seen. It is a curious thing. At the top is the following inscription:
THIS BUILDING PRESENTED TO THE CITY OF HANNIBAL, MAY 7, 1912, BY MR. AND MRS. GEORGE A. MAHAN AS A MEMORIAL TO MARK TWAIN
Beneath the legend is a portrait bust of the author in bas relief. At the bottom of the tablet is another inscription. From across the room I saw that it was set off in quotation marks, and assuming, of course, that it was some particularly suitable extract from the works of the most quotable of all Americans, I stepped across and read it. This is what it said:
"MARK TWAIN'S LIFE TEACHES THAT POVERTY IS AN INCENTIVE RATHER THAN A BAR: AND THAT ANY BOY, HOWEVER HUMBLE HIS BIRTH AND SURROUNDINGS, MAY BY HONESTY AND INDUSTRY ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS."
That inscription made me think of many things. It made me think of Napoleon's inscription on the statue of Henri IV, and of Judge Thatcher's talk with Tom Sawyer, in the Sunday school, and of Mr. Walters, the Sunday school superintendent, in the same book, and of certain moral lessons drawn by Andrew Carnegie. And not the least thing of which it made me think was the mischievous, shiftless, troublesome, sandy-haired young rascal who hated school and Sunday school and yet became the more than honest, more than industrious man, commemorated there.
