and stirred up a good deal of a storm. He wrote much more on the
subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished.

CCXXI. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

One day in April, 1902, Samuel Clemens received the following letter
from the president of the University of Missouri:

MY DEAR MR. CLEMENS, Although you received the degree of doctor of
literature last fall from Yale, and have had other honors conferred upon
you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of
the University of Missouri. In asking your permission to confer upon you
the degree of LL.D. the University of Missouri does not aim to confer an
honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you. The rules of
the University forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia.
I hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on
the fourth day of next June, when we shall hold our Annual Commencement.

Very truly yours,
R. H. JESSE.

Clemens had not expected to make another trip to the West, but a
proffered honor such as this from one's native State was not a thing to
be declined.

It was at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at
the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby--as
fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before.

"I have become an old man. You are still thirty-five," Clemens said.

They went to the Planters Hotel, and the news presently got around that
Mark Twain was there. There followed a sort of reception in the hotel
lobby, after which Bixby took him across to the rooms of the Pilots
Association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his
return. A few of his old comrades were still alive, among them Beck
Jolly. The same afternoon he took the train for Hannibal.

It was a busy five days that he had in Hannibal. High-school
commencement day came first. He attended, and willingly, or at
least patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and
orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school
commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of
those young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished
time. A few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among
the audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future. Their
heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded