Later in the year (March, 1907) I also made a journey; it having been agreed that I should take a trip to the Mississippi and to the Pacific coast to see those old friends of Mark Twain’s who were so rapidly passing away.  John Briggs was still alive, and other Hannibal schoolmates; also Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis, and a few more of the early pioneers—­all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work as I had in hand.  The billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside in view of prospective benefits.  Clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials.

It was a long, successful trip that I made, and it was undertaken none too soon.  John Briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in the cave and on Holliday’s Hill.  I think it was six weeks later that he died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not reach the end of the year.  Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912), journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told old tales and adventures.  When I left he said: 

“Tell Sam I’m going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I’ve loved him all my life, and I’ll love him till I die.  This is the last word I’ll ever send to him.”  Jim Gillis, down in Sonora, was already lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late, though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner, and to send back a parting word.

I returned by way of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, for I wished to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding genius, Horace Bixby,—­[He died August 2, 1912, at the age of 86]—­still alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his headquarters at St. Louis.

Coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still exist, I noticed in a paper which came aboard that Mark Twain was to receive from Oxford University the literary doctor’s degree.  There had been no hint of this when I came away, and it seemed rather too sudden and too good to be true.  That the little barefoot lad that had played along the river-banks at Hannibal, and received such meager advantages in the way of schooling—­whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a craft as this one—­was about to be crowned by the world’s greatest institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be likely to happen outside of a fairy tale.