On Sunday morning Col.  John Robards escorted him to the various churches and Sunday-schools.  They were all new churches to Samuel Clemens, but he pretended not to recognize this fact.  In each one he was asked to speak a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old home Sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings.  At one place he told a moral story.  He said: 

Little boys and girls, I want to tell you a story which illustrates the value of perseverance—­of sticking to your work, as it were.  It is a story very proper for a Sunday-school.  When I was a little boy in Hannibal I used to play a good deal up here on Holliday’s Hill, which of course you all know.  John Briggs and I played up there.  I don’t suppose there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is not to be expected.  Little boys in those days were ’most always good little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was better than it is now, but never mind that.  Well, once upon a time, on Holliday’s Hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for a blast.  He sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast.  Then he put in the powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched him.  He went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller.  First he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight.  John Briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just persevering, you see, and sticking to his work.  Little boys and girls, that’s the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on Holliday’s Hill.  Of course you won’t always be appreciated.  He wasn’t.  His employer was a hard man, and on Saturday night when he paid him he docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air—­but never mind, he had his reward.

He told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the Sunday-school was in a storm of enjoyment when he finished.  There still remains a doubt in Hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its acceptability.

That Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday’s Hill —­the Cardiff Hill of Tom Sawyer.  It was jest such a Sunday as that one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a cooper-shop.  They calculated that nearly three thousand Sundays had passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in the sun.  Standing there together and looking across to the low-lying Illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to Lover’s Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam Clemens said: