Mark Twain returns to Hannibal, Missouri...

... and hears an opinion of a local regarding St. Louis when he inquires about an old acquaintance:

I named another boy.

“Well now, his case is curious! There wasn’t a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead—perfect dummy, just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn’t the first lawyer in the state of Missouri today, I’m a Democrat!”

“Is that so?”

“It’s actually so. I’m telling you the truth.”

“How do you account for it?”

“Account for it? There ain’t any accounting for it, except that if you send a d—-d fool to St. Louis, and you don’t tell them he’s a d—-d fool, they’ll never find it out. There’s one thing sure: if I had a d—-d fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis—it’s the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to look at it all around and chew at it and think it over, don’t it just bang anything you ever heard of?”

“Well, yes—it does seem to. But don’t you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people?”

“Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle—they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have known him. No, if you have got any d—-d fools that you want to realize on, take my advice—send them to St. Louis.”

Blogged for those who don't like St. Louis. Via Lapham's Quarterly.