One day at luncheon I found myself between two very lovely creatures--neither of them over twenty-two or twenty-three; both of them endowed with the aplomb of older, more experienced, women--who endeared themselves to me by talking critically about the works of Meredith--and Joseph Conrad--and Leonard Merrick. Fancy that! Fancy their being pretty girls yet having worth-while things to say--and about those three men!
And when the conversation drifted away from books to the topic which my companion and I call "life stuff," and when I found them adept also in that field, my appreciation of St. Louis became boundless.
It just occurs to me that, in publishing the fact that St. Louis girls have brains I may have unintentionally done them an unkindness.
Once I asked a young English bachelor to my house for a week-end.
"I want you to come this week," I said, "because the prettiest girl I know will be there."
"She's a most unusual girl," I went on, "for, besides being a dream of loveliness, she's clever."
"Oh," he said, "if she's clever, let me come some other time. I don't like 'em clever. I like 'em pretty and stupid."
If black slaves are no longer bought and sold there, if the river trade has dwindled, if the railroad and the factory have come, bringing a larger population with them, if the town now has a hundred-thousand-dollar city hall, a country club, and "fifty-six passenger trains daily," it is, at all events, a pleasure to record the fact that Hannibal, Missouri, retains to-day that look of soft and shambling picturesqueness suitable to an old river town, and essential to the "St. Petersburg" of fiction--the perpetual dwelling place of those immortal boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Should this characterization of the town fail to meet with the approval of the Hannibal Commercial Club, I regret it, for I honor the Commercial Club because of its action toward the preservation of a thing so uncommercial as the boyhood home of Mark Twain. But, after all, the club must remember that, in its creditable effort to build up a newer and finer Hannibal, a Hannibal of brick and granite, it is running counter to the sentimental interests of innumerable persons who, though most of them have never seen the old town and never will, yet think of it as given to them by Mark Twain, with a peculiar tenderness, as though it were a Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn among the cities--a ragged, happy boy of a town, which ought never, never to grow up.