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.’

‘How good you are!’

‘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.

Chapter 57 An Archangel

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.