the famous
characters in Mark Twain's _Tom Sawyer_. She had been a member of
the Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years,
and was a highly respected lady. For the past eight years she had
been an invalid, but was as well cared for by Mr. Dickason and his
family as if she had been a near relative. She was a member of the
Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.

I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind which was graven
there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago. She was at that
time nine years old, and I was about eleven. I remember where she stood,
and how she looked; and I can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her
brown face, and her short tow-linen frock. She was crying. What it was
about, I have long ago forgotten. But it was the tears that preserved
the picture for me, no doubt. She was a good child, I can say that for
her. She knew me nearly seventy years ago. Did she forget me, in the
course of time? I think not. If she had lived in Stratford in
Shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him? Yes. For he was never
famous during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and
there wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a
week.

"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were prominent and very
intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations ago. Plenty of
gray-heads there remember them to this day, and can tell you about them.
Isn't it curious that two "town-drunkards" and one half-breed loafer
should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a
hundred times greater and several hundred times more particularized in
the matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the
village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?

MARK TWAIN.

Footnotes:

{1} Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.

{2} From chapter XIII of "The Shakespeare Problem Restated."

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