no," he said, "no, I can't say that I am always cheerful,
but--well, you know that kind of a night that comes: _say_--you wake up
'way in the night and the whole world is sunk in gloom and there are
storms and earthquakes and all sorts of disasters in the air
threatening, and you get cold and clammy; and when that happens to me I
recognize how sinful I am and it all goes clear to my heart and wrings
it and I have such terrors and terrors!--oh, they are indescribable,
those terrors that assail me, and I slip out of bed and get on my knees
and pray and pray and promise that I will be good, if I can only have
another chance. And then, you know, in the morning the sun shines out so
lovely, and the birds sing and the whole world is so beautiful, and--_b'
God, I rally!_"

Now I will quote a brief paragraph from this letter which I have a
minute ago spoken of. The writer says:

You no doubt are at a loss to know who I am. I will tell you. In my
younger days I was a resident of Hannibal, Mo., and you and I were
schoolmates attending Mr. Dawson's school along with Sam and Will
Bowen and Andy Fuqua and others whose names I have forgotten. I was
then about the smallest boy in school, for my age, and they called
me little Aleck for short.

I only dimly remember him, but I knew those other people as well as I
knew the town drunkards. I remember Dawson's schoolhouse perfectly. If I
wanted to describe it I could save myself the trouble by conveying the
description of it to these pages from "Tom Sawyer." I can remember the
drowsy and inviting summer sounds that used to float in through the open
windows from that distant boy-Paradise, Cardiff Hill (Holliday's Hill),
and mingle with the murmurs of the studying pupils and make them the
more dreary by the contrast. I remember Andy Fuqua, the oldest pupil--a
man of twenty-five. I remember the youngest pupil, Nannie Owsley, a
child of seven. I remember George Robards, eighteen or twenty years old,
the only pupil who studied Latin. I remember--in some cases vividly, in
others vaguely--the rest of the twenty-five boys and girls. I remember
Mr. Dawson very well. I remember his boy, Theodore, who was as good as
he could be. In fact, he was inordinately good, extravagantly good,
offensively good, detestably good--and he had pop-eyes--and I would have
drowned him if I had had a chance. In that school we were all about on
an equality, and, so far as I remember,