ied 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 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 today, 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 numbers--there are still findable