My brother rattled innocently on—
’When you were talking in your sleep, you kept
mumbling something about “matches,” which
I couldn’t make anything out of; but just now,
when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose
and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you
mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times; so I put
this and that together, you see, and right away I knew
it was Ben that burnt that man up.’
I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently
he asked—
‘Are you going to give him up to the law?’
‘No,’ I said; ’I believe that this
will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye
on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he
stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said
that I betrayed him.’
‘Well, I try to be. It is all a person
can do in a world like this.’
And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders,
my terrors soon faded away.
The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell
under my notice— the surprising spread
which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned
it from one of the most unostentatious of men—the
colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three
miles from town. He was to call for me at the
Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But
he missed it considerably—did not arrive
till ten. He excused himself by saying—
‘De time is mos’ an hour en a half slower
in de country en what it is in de town; you’ll
be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out
early for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right
plum in de middle er de sermon. Diffunce in
de time. A body can’t make no calculations
’bout it.’
I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned
a fact worth four.
From St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening
signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent,
prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations.
The people don’t dream, they work. The
happy result is manifest all around in the substantial
outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome
life and comfort that everywhere appear.
Quincy is a notable example—a brisk, handsome,
well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested
in art, letters, and other high things.
But Marion City is an exception. Marion City
has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way.
This metropolis promised so well that the projectors
tacked ‘city’ to its name in the very beginning,
with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy.
When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago,
it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses.
It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state
of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five
into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too
near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage:
it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water
mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of
a hill.
