villagers. Why did not the inquirer hunt them up and interview them?
Wasn't it worth while? Wasn't the matter of sufficient consequence? Had
the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight and couldn't spare the
time?

It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity, there or
elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager.

Now then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year being already
well behind me--yet _sixteen_ of my Hannibal schoolmates are still alive
to-day, and can tell--and do tell--inquirers dozens and dozens of
incidents of their young lives and mine together; things that happened to
us in the morning of life, in the blossom of our youth, in the good days,
the dear days, "the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago." Most
of them creditable to me, too. One child to whom I paid court when she
was five years old and I eight still lives in Hannibal, and she visited
me last summer, traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred miles of
railroad without damage to her patience or to her old-young vigor.
Another little lassie to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when she was
nine years old and I the same, is still alive--in London--and hale and
hearty, just as I am. And on the few surviving steamboats--those
lingering ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big
river in the beginning of my water-career--which is exactly as long ago
as the whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare number--there are
still findable two or three river-pilots who saw me do creditable things
in those ancient days; and several white-headed engineers; and several
roustabouts and mates; and several deck-hands who used to heave the lead
for me and send up on the still night air the "six--feet--_scant_!" that
made me shudder, and the "_M-a-r-k--twain_!" that took the shudder away,
and presently the darling "By the d-e-e-p--four!" that lifted me to
heaven for joy. {1} They know about me, and can tell. And so do
printers, from St. Louis to New York; and so do newspaper reporters, from
Nevada to San Francisco. And so do the police. If Shakespeare had
really been celebrated, like me, Stratford could have told things about
him; and if my experience goes for anything, they'd have done it.

CHAPTER VII

If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide
whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe I would place
before the debaters only the one q