86.] And yet that man, who
came to know, in age, the courses of human emotions the world over, could,
as a young man, shut his eyes and trace the river from St. Louis to New
Orleans, and read its face as one "would cull the news from a morning
paper."
It was for years a wish of mine that when Mark Twain should come to die,
he should lie not in an ordinary sepulchre of earth but in the river which
he knew so well and loved, and of whose golden days he sang. I wished that
the river might be turned aside from its wonted channel, as the River
Busentinus for the interment of Alaric, and then, after his burial there,
be let back into it again, that he might ever hear the sonorous voice of
its waters above him, and, perhaps, now and then the call of the leadsman
overhead, crying the depth beneath, as he himself in the pilot-house used
once to hear the call "Mark Twain" from the darkness below. So it was a
disappointment to me that when the world followed him to his grave it was
to a little patch of earth outside the valley, beyond the reach of even
the farthest tributary of the Mississippi.
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