Albert J. Beveridge says of Riley, "The aristocrat may make verses whose perfect art renders them immortal, like Horace, or state high truths in austere beauty, like Arnold. But only the brother of the common man can tell what the common heart longs for and feels, and only he lives in the understanding and affection of the millions." SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, 1835-1910 [Illustration: MARK TWAIN] LIFE IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.--The author who is known in every village of the United States by the pen name of Mark Twain, which is the river phrase for two fathoms of water, was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He says of his birthplace: "The village contained a hundred people, and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than the best man in history ever did for any other town." When he was two and a half years old, the family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi, thirty miles away. The most impressionable years of his boyhood were spent in Hannibal, which he calls "a loafing, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town." He attended only a common school, a picture of which is given in _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_. Even this schooling ceased at the age of twelve, when his father died. Like Benjamin Franklin and W. D. Howells, the boy then became a printer, and followed this trade in various places for nearly eight years, traveling east as far as the City of New York. He next became a "cub," or under pilot, on the Mississippi River. After an eighteen months' apprenticeship, he was an excellent pilot, and he received two hundred and fifty dollars a month for his services. He says of these days: "Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone." For an inimitable account of these days, the first twenty-one chapters of his _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883) should be read. "... in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of education.... When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river." [Footnote: _Life on the Mississippi_, Chapter XVIII.] No other work in American literature or history can take the place of this book and of his three great stories (pp. 359-361), which bring us face to face with life in the great Mississippi Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century.