This ass had been reading the ‘Jibbenainosay,’ no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist.

However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep.  It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him—­under strict secrecy.  I advised him to ‘fly,’ and certainly expected him to do it.  But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter’s shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg—­then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero.  The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug.  I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more.  He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known.  The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet.

The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town.  It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water-works, and probably a debt.  It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south—­where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them.  The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars.  In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results.  A deal of money changes hands there now.

Bear Creek—­so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears—­is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it.  I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in.  It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day.  I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once.  Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt.  The chasm or gorge between Lover’s Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action.  This is a mistake.