has touched many human hearts.
Furthermore, he has unusual humor, which is as delightful and as pervasive as the odor of his clover fields. Humor drives home to us the application of the optimistic philosophy in these lines:—
"When a man's jest glad plum through,
God's pleased with him, same as you."
"When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
W'y, rain's my choice."
In poems like Griggsby's Station he shows his power in making a subject pathetic and humorous at the same time.
Albert J. Beveridge says of Riley, "The aristocrat may make verses whose perfect art renders them immortal, like Horace, or state high truths in austere beauty, like Arnold. But only the brother of the common man can tell what the common heart longs for and feels, and only he lives in the understanding and affection of the millions."
SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, 1835-1910
[Illustration: MARK TWAIN]
LIFE IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.—The author who is known in every village of the United States by the pen name of Mark Twain, which is the river phrase for two fathoms of water, was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He says of his birthplace: "The village contained a hundred people, and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than the best man in history ever did for any other town." When he was two and a half years old, the family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi, thirty miles away.
The most impressionable years of his boyhood were spent in Hannibal, which he calls "a loafing, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town." He attended only a common school, a picture of which is given in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Even this schooling ceased at the age of twelve, when his father died. Like Benjamin Franklin and W. D. Howells, the boy then became a printer, and followed this trade in various places for nearly eight years, traveling east as far as the City of New York. He next became a "cub," or under pilot, on the Mississippi River. After an eighteen months' apprenticeship, he was an excellent pilot, and he received two hundred and fifty dollars a month for his services. He says of these days: "Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone." For an inimitable account of these days, the first twenty-one chapters of his Life on the Mississippi (1883) should be read.