to whom I had told the cat story when we were
callow juveniles was still present in that cheerful little old man.

Artimisia Briggs got married not long after refusing me. She married
Richmond, the stone mason, who was my Methodist Sunday-school teacher in
the earliest days, and he had one distinction which I envied him: at
some time or other he had hit his thumb with his hammer and the result
was a thumb nail which remained permanently twisted and distorted and
curved and pointed, like a parrot's beak. I should not consider it an
ornament now, I suppose, but it had a fascination for me then, and a
vast value, because it was the only one in the town. He was a very
kindly and considerate Sunday-school teacher, and patient and
compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. In
that school they had slender oblong pasteboard blue tickets, each with a
verse from the Testament printed on it, and you could get a blue ticket
by reciting two verses. By reciting five verses you could get three blue
tickets, and you could trade these at the bookcase and borrow a book for
a week. I was under Mr. Richmond's spiritual care every now and then for
two or three years, and he was never hard upon me. I always recited the
same five verses every Sunday. He was always satisfied with the
performance. He never seemed to notice that these were the same five
foolish virgins that he had been hearing about every Sunday for months.
I always got my tickets and exchanged them for a book. They were pretty
dreary books, for there was not a bad boy in the entire bookcase. They
were _all_ good boys and good girls and drearily uninteresting, but they
were better society than none, and I was glad to have their company and
disapprove of it.

[Sidenote: (1849.)]

Twenty years ago Mr. Richmond had become possessed of Tom Sawyer's cave
in the hills three miles from town, and had made a tourist-resort of it.
In 1849 when the gold-seekers were streaming through our little town of
Hannibal, many of our grown men got the gold fever, and I think that all
the boys had it. On the Saturday holidays in summer-time we used to
borrow skiffs whose owners were not present and go down the river three
miles to the cave hollow (Missourian for "valley"), and there we staked
out claims and pretended to dig gold, panning out half a dollar a day at
first; two or three times as much, later, and by and by whole fortunes,
as our imaginations became inured to t