A friendly policeman volunteered the news that he had seen Twain or "some one very like him" driving a buggy the day before. This gave me a delightful sense of nearness. Fancy living in a town where you could see the author of Tom Sawyer, or "some one very like him," jolting over the pavements in a buggy!
"He lives out yonder at East Hill," said the policeman; "three miles from here."
Then the chase began—in a hired hack, up an awful hill, where sunflowers blossomed by the roadside, and crops waved, and Harper's Magazine cows stood in eligible and commanding attitudes knee-deep in clover, all ready to be transferred to photogravure. The great man must have been persecuted by outsiders aforetime, and fled up the hill for refuge.
Presently the driver stopped at a miserable, little, white wood shanty, and demanded "Mister Clemens."
"I know he's a big-bug and all that," he explained, "but you can never tell what sort of notions those sort of men take into their heads to live in, anyways."
There rose up a young lady who was sketching thistle-tops and goldenrod, amid a plentiful supply of both, and set the pilgrimage on the right path.
"It's a pretty Gothic house on the left-hand side a little way farther on."
"Gothic h——," said the driver. "Very few of the city hacks take this drive, specially if they know they are coming out here," and he glared at me savagely.
It was a very pretty house, anything but Gothic, clothed with ivy, standing in a very big compound, and fronted by a verandah full of chairs and hammocks. The roof of the verandah was a trellis-work of creepers, and the sun peeping through moved on the shining boards below.
Decidedly this remote place was an ideal one for work, if a man could work among these soft airs and the murmur of the long-eared crops.