ngs quite likely to result,
most likely to result, indeed substantially _sure_ to result in the case
of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the human race. Like me.

My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks
of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I entered
school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to another in
the village during nine and a half years. Then my father died, leaving
his family in exceedingly straitened circumstances; wherefore my
book-education came to a standstill forever, and I became a printer's
apprentice, on board and clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a
hymn-book in place of them. This for summer wear, probably. I lived in
Hannibal fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according
to the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. I never
lived there afterward. Four years later I became a "cub" on a
Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and after a
year and a half of hard study and hard work the U. S. inspectors
rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings and decided that
I knew every inch of the Mississippi--thirteen hundred miles--in the dark
and in the day--as well as a baby knows the way to its mother's paps day
or night. So they licensed me as a pilot--knighted me, so to speak--and
I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of the United
States government.

Now then. Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two. He had lived
in his native village twenty-six years, or about that. He died
celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books). Yet when
he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty
years afterward no townsman remembered to say anything about him or about
his life in Stratford. When the inquirer came at last he got but one
fact--no, _legend_--and got that one at second hand, from a person who
had only heard it as a rumor, and didn't claim copyright in it as a
production of his own. He couldn't, very well, for its date antedated
his own birth-date. But necessarily a number of persons were still alive
in Stratford who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly
every day in the last five years of his life, and they would have been
able to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in
those last days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to
the