It is said that a memorial tablet, intended to mark the birthplace of Eugene Field in St. Louis, was placed, not only upon the wrong house, but upon a house in the wrong street. Mark Twain unveiled the tablet; one can fancy the spirits of these two Missouri literary men meeting somewhere and smiling together over that. But if the shade of Mark Twain should undertake to chaff that of the poet upon the fact that mortals had erred as to the location of his birthplace, the shade of Field would not be able to retort in kind, for--thanks partly to the fact that Mark Twain was known for a genius while he was yet alive, and partly to the indefatigable labors of his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine--a vast fund of accurate information has been preserved, covering the life of the great Missourian, from the time of his birth in the little hamlet of Florida, Mo., to his death in Reading, Conn. No; if the shade of Field should wish to return the jest, it would probably call the humorist's attention to a certain memorial tablet in the Mark Twain house in Hannibal. But of that presently. I have said that the Commercial Club honored Mark Twain's memory. That is true. But the Commercial Club would not be a Commercial Club if it did not also wish the visitor to take into consideration certain other matters. In effect it says to him: "Yes, indeed, Mark Twain spent the most important part of his boyhood here. But we wish you to understand that Hannibal is a busy, growing town. We have the cheapest electric power in the Mississippi Valley. We offer free factory sites. We--" "Yes," you say, "but where is the Mark Twain house?" "Oh--" says Hannibal, catching its breath. "Go right on up Main to Hill Street; you'll find it just around the corner. Any one will point it out to you. There's a bronze tablet in the wall. But put this little pamphlet in your pocket. It tells all about our city. You can read it at your leisure." You take the pamphlet and move along up Main Street. And if there is a sympathetic native with you he will stop you at the corner of Main and Bird--they call it Wildcat Corner--and point out a little wooden shanty adjoining a nearby alley, where, it is said, Mark Twain's father, John Marshall Clemens, had his office when he was Justice of the Peace--the same office in which Samuel Clemens in his boyhood saw the corpse lying on the floor, by moonlight, as recounted in "The Innocents Abroad." [Illustration: We came upon the "Mark Twain House".... And to think that, wretched as this place was, the Clemens family were forced to leave it for a time because they were too poor to live there!] It was at Wildcat Corner, too, that the boys conducted that famous piece of high finance: trading off the green watermelon, which they had stolen, for a ripe one, on the allegation that the former had been purchased.