 One day on board the Alex Scott, my chief, Mr. Bixby, was crawling carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane-deck, For gracious sake, give her steam, Mr. Bixby, give her steam! She'll never raise the reef on this headway! For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. Bixby, one would have supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when the danger was passed and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to. No bloodshed ensued, but that was because the captain's cause was weak. For ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly. Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of steamboat men, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild. It was curious and noteworthy in this that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men. For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month, but curiously enough as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the wages began to fall little by little. It was easy to discover the reason of this. Too many pilots were being made. It was nice to have a cub, a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked. All pilots and captains had sons or nephews who wanted to be pilots. By and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. When a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's license for him by signing an application directed to the United States Inspector. Nothing further was needed. Usually no questions were asked, no proofs of capacity required. Very well this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages in order to get births. Too late, apparently, the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly something had to be done, and quickly, but what was to be the needful thing? A close organization. Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an impossibility, so it was talked and talked, and then dropped. It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter, but at last about a dozen of the boldest and some of them the best pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a special charter from the legislature with large powers under the name of the pilot's benevolent association, elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put association wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once, and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment. But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their bylaws which had the seeds of propagation in them. For instance, all idle members of the association in good standing were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new fledged pilots in the dull summer season. Better have twenty-five dollars than starve. The initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed. Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances, anyway, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightaway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month and calculate their burial bills. By and by all the useless, helpless pilots and a dozen first-class ones were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing stock of the whole river. They joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten percent of their wages every month into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving. And everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty. And it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chafing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip so that they could see what the Forgotten River looked like. However, the association was content, or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was out of luck and added him to its list. And these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots. The incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars, the association figure, and became firmly fixed there. And still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired, the hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with. However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached. Business doubled and troubled. And an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois, and upper Mississippi riverboats came pouring down to take a chance in the New Orleans trade. All of a sudden pilots were in great demand and were correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered. So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed. They must be sought out and asked for their services. Captain Blank was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said, Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I'll give in with as good a grace as I can. I've come to hire you. Get your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o'clock. I don't know about that. Who is your other pilot? I've got IS. Why? I can't go with him. He don't belong to the association. What? It's so. Do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your association? Yes, I do. Well, if this isn't putting on airs, I suppose I was doing you a benevolence, but I begin to think that I am the party that wants a favor done. Are you acting under a law of the concern? Yes? Show it to me. So they stepped into the association rooms and the secretary soon satisfied the captain who said, Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S. for the entire season. I will provide for you, said the secretary. I will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock. But if I discharge S. he will come on me for the whole season's wages. Of course, that is a matter between you and Mr. S. Captain, we cannot meddle in your private affairs. The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S. pay him about a thousand dollars and take an association pilot in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. Every day, thanks forward, a new victim fell. Every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet with tears and profanity and installed a hated association man in his birth. In a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business spurt was over. Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and the crews of boats that had two non-association pilots, but their triumph was not very long lived for this reason. It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never under any circumstances whatever give information about the channel to any outsider. By this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game, but this was not so. At every good-sized town, from one end of the river to the other, there was a wharfboat to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for transportation. Waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of these wharfboats the association's officers placed a strong box, fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one, the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger, for the success of the St. Louis and Norland's association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighbouring steamboat trades. Was the association man's sign and diploma of membership, and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. From the association secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a bill-head. On handsome paper, properly ruled in columns, a bill-head worded something like this. Steamer, Great Republic, John Smith, Master, Pilots, John Jones, and Thomas Brown. Crossings, soundings, marks, remarks. These blanks were filled up day by day as the voyage progressed and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first crossing out from St. Louis was completed the items would be entered upon the blank under the appropriate headings thus. St. Louis, nine-and-a-half feet, stern on the courthouse, head on dead cottonwood above Woodyard until he raised the first reef, then pull up square. Then under head of remarks, go just outside the wrecks. This is important. New snag, just where you straighten down. Go above it. The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box, after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis, took out and read half a dozen fresh reports from upward-bound steamers. Concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid. Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve or thirteen hundred miles long whose channel was shifting every day. The pilot, who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for him now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If the reports in the last box chance to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy. He blew his steam-wistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching. The signal was answered in a peculiar way, if that boat's pilots were association men, and then the two steamers ranged alongside, and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail. The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans, or St. Louis, was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlours and hang it up there, after which he was free to visit his family. In these parlours a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. Other craftsmen can sink the shop sometimes and interest themselves in other matters, not so with a pilot, he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else, for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. He has no time or words to waste if he would keep posted. But the outsiders had a hard time of it, no particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharfboat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered, but when the dead low water came it was destructive. Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to ground steam boats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders and previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable. Still they made a show of keeping up the brag until one black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered to immediately discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead. And who was it that had the dashing presumption to do that? Alas, it came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself. It was the underwriters. It was no time to swap knives. Every outsider had to take his trunk ashore at once. Of course, it was supposed that there was collusion between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the report system of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among themselves and upon plain business principles. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the outsiders now, but no matter, there was just but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars, that some must be tendered, and also ten percent of the wages which the applicant had received each and every month since the founding of the association. In many cases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. Still the association would not entertain the application until the money was present. Even then a single adverse vote killed the application. Every member had to vote yes or no in person and before witnesses, so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages. However the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. A time came at last when only about ten remained outside. They said they would starve before they would apply. They remained idle a long time, because of course nobody could venture to employ them. By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the branch associations had grown strong now, and the Red River one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There was another new by-law by this time which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the time of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. The most virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed dues to accumulate against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application. The association had a good bank account now and was very strong. There was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years, after which time a limited number would be taken not by individuals, but by the association upon these terms. The applicant must not be less than eighteen years old and of respectable family and good character. He must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association until a great part of the membership, more than half, I think, should be willing to sign his application for a pilot's license. All previously article-deprentices were now taken away from their masters and adopted by the association. The President and Secretary detailed them for service on one boat or another as they chose and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him. The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's financial resources. The association attended its own funerals in state and paid for them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents. A search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars. The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on steamboats. The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in the world. By the United States' law, no man could become a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application, and now there was nobody outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the making of pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others would become incapacitated by age and infirmity. There would be no new ones to take their places. In time the association could put wages up to any figure it chose. And as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it. The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power, and at last this one was removed. Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves. When the pilot's association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September 1861 wages would be advanced to $500 per month, the owners and captains instantly put freight up a few cents and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established. It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages. So straight away the captains and owners got up an association of their own and proposed to put captains' wages up to $500 too and move for another advance in freight. It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. The new association decreed, for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilot's association, that if any captain employed a non-association pilot he should be forced to discharge him and also pay a fine of $500. Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership, but that all ceased presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain, but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances. As I have remarked, the pilot's association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible, and yet the days of its glory were numbered. First the new railroads stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky to northern railway centers began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers. Next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steam-boating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilot's idol and the cost of living advancing all the time. Then the treasurer of the St. Louis Association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund, and finally the railroads intruding everywhere there was little for steamers to do when the war was over, but carry freight. So straightway some genius from the Atlantic Coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tugboat, and behold, in the twinkling of an eye as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past. 15 It was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward they would be burning rosin and pitch pine, the sign of preparation, and so one had the picturesque spectacle of a rank some two or three miles long of tall ascending columns of coal-black smoke, a colonnade which supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city. Every outboard-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis. Countless processions of freight-barrels and boxes were spinning a thwerp the levee, and flying aboard the stage planks. Belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the folksal companion-way alive, but having their doubts about it, women with reticules and band-boxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction. Draze and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry every now and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and dimly. Every windless, connected with every forehatch, from one end of that long array of steam-boats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as, de la sac, de la sac, inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. By this time the hurricane and boiler-decks of the steamers would be packed and black with passengers. The last bells would begin to clang, all down the line, and then the pow-wow seemed to double. In a moment or two the final warning came, a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs with a cry, all that ain't going, pleased to get shaw! And behold, the pow-wow quadrupled. People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a long array of stage planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring shoreward over his head. Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd the decks of boats that are not to go in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deckhands, usually swar the negroes, massed together on the folksal. The best voice in the lot towering from the myths, being mounted on the capstan, waving his hat or a flag, and all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom, and the multitude and the spectator swing their hats and hazzah! Steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river. In the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were nightfall, and the folksal lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public always had an idea that racing was dangerous, whereas the opposite was the case, that is, after the laws were passed, which restricted each boat to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch, no engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place was on slow plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the doctor and shut off the water supply from the boilers. In the flush times of steamboating, a race between two notoriously fleet steamers was an event of vast importance. The date was set for it several weeks in advance, and from that time forward the whole Mississippi Valley was in a state of consuming excitement. Politics and the weather were dropped, and people talked only of the coming race. As the time approached, the two steamers stripped and got ready. Every encumbrance that added weight or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water was removed, if the boat could possibly do without it. The spars and sometimes even their supporting derricks were sent ashore, and no means left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground. When the Eclipse and the AL Shotwell ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the Eclipse's chimneys, and that for that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things. If the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a half feet forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that exact figure. She wouldn't enter a dose of homeopathic pills on her manifest after that. Hardly any passengers were taken, because they not only add weight, but they never will trim boat. They always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level. No wayfrates and no way passengers were allowed, for the racers would stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only touch and go. Coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and these were kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's warning. Double crews were carried so that all work could be quickly done. The chosen date being come, and all things in readiness, the two great steamers back into the stream, there jockeying a moment, and apparently watching each other's slightest movement, like sentient creatures, flags drooping, the pent-steams shrieking through safety valves, the black smoke rolling and tumbling from the chimneys and darkening all the air. People, people everywhere. The shores, the housetops, the steamboats, the ships are packed with them, and you know that the borders of the broad Mississippi are going to be fringed with humanity thence northward twelve hundred miles to welcome these racers. Presently, tall columns of steam burst forth from the scape-pipes of both steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes mounted on capstans, waved their small flags above the masked crews on the foxels, two plaintive solos linger on the air a few waiting seconds, two mighty choruses burst forth, and here they come. Brass bands bray hail Columbia, huzzah after huzzah thunders from the shores, and the stately creatures go whistling by like the wind. Those boats will never halt a moment between New Orleans and St. Louis, except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty cord wood-boats alongside. You should be on board when they take a couple of those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each. By the time you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be wondering what has become of that wood. Two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after day. They might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are not all alike and the smartest pilots will win the race. If one of the boats has a lightning pilot whose partner is a trifle his inferior, you can tell which one is on watch by noting whether that boat has gained ground or lost some during each four-hour stretch. The shrewdest pilot can delay a boat if he is not a fine genius for steering. Steering is a very high art. One must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat stern if he wants to get up the river fast. There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. But, of course, this was at rare intervals. Fairy boats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died waiting for us to get by. This was at still rarer intervals. I had the documents for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid. This boat, the John J. Rowe, was so slow that when she finally sunk in Madrid Bend it was five years before the owners heard of it. That was always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record, anyway. She was dismally slow. Still we often had pretty exciting times racing with islands and rafts and such things. One trip, however, we did rather well. We went to St. Louis in sixteen days. But even at this rattling gate I think we changed watches three times in Fort Adams Reach, which is five miles long. A reach is a piece of straight river and, of course, the current drives through such a place in a pretty lively way. That trip we went to Grand Gulf from New Orleans in four days, three hundred and forty miles. The eclipse and Shotwell did it in one. We were nine days out in the shoot of sixty-three, seven hundred miles. The eclipse and Shotwell went there in two days. Something over a generation ago a boat called the J. M. White went from New Orleans to Cairo in three days, six hours and forty-four minutes. In eighteen fifty-three the eclipse made the same trip in three days, three hours and twenty minutes. Footnote, time disputed, some authorities add one hour and sixteen minutes to this. In eighteen seventy the R. E. Lee did it in three days and one hour. This last is called the fastest trip on record. I will try to show that it was not. For this reason the distance between New Orleans and Cairo when the J. M. White ran it was about eleven hundred and six miles. Consequently her average speed was a trifle over fourteen miles per hour. In the Eclipse's day the distance between the two ports had become reduced to one thousand and eighty miles. Consequently her average speed was a shade under fourteen and three-eighths miles per hour. In the R. E. Lee's time the distance had diminished to about one thousand and thirty miles. Consequently her average was about fourteen and one-eighth mile per hour. Therefore the Eclipse's was conspicuously the fastest time that has ever been made. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Chapter 17. Cut-offs and Stephen. These dry details are of importance in one particular. They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities, that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-pairing over your shoulder it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi, that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two hundred miles stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much. The water cuts the alluvial banks of the lower river into deep horseshoe curves, so deep indeed that in some places, if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three-quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours, while your steamer was coming round the long elbow at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is rising fast some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened. To it the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank, quadrupling its value, and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big island, and the old water-core surrounded will soon show up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth. Watches are kept on those narrow necks at needful times, and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity to cut a ditch. Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. Once there was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only half a mile across in its narrowest place, you could walk across there in fifteen minutes, but if you made the journey around the Cape on a raft, you travelled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing. In 1722 the river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed, and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles. In the same way it shortened itself twenty-five miles at Black Hawk Point in 1699. Below Red River Landing, Recursy Cut-Off was made, forty or fifty years ago, I think. This shortened the river twenty-eight miles. In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go about seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles, shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten time in the past cut-offs were made above Adalia, Louisiana, at Island ninety-two, at Island eighty-four, and at Hale's Point. These shortened the river in the aggregate seventy-seven miles. Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at Hurricane Island, at Island one hundred, at Napoleon, Arkansas, at Walnut Bend, and at Council Bend. These shortened the river in the aggregate sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend, which shortened the river ten miles or more. Therefore the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of seventeen twenty-two. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. Now if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people and let on to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here. Geology never had such a chance nor such exact data to argue from, nor development of species either. Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague, vague. Please observe. In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore any calm person who is not blind or idiotic can see that in the old Olytic Celerian period, just a million years ago next November, the lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will only be a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plotting comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of alderman. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been speaking of it is time for the people thereabouts to move. The water cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a hundred yards the banks begin to peel off and slices half an acre wide. The current flowing around the bend traveled formally only five miles an hour. Now it is tremendously increased by the shortening of the distance. I was on board the first boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend, but we did not get through. It was toward midnight, and a wild night it was, thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain. It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making about fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Twelve or thirteen was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water. Therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. However, Mr. Brown was ambitious and he kept on trying. The eddy running up the bank under the point was about as swift as the current out in the middle, so we would go flying up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of steam, and stand by for a surge when we struck the current that was whirling by the point. But all our preparations were useless. The instant the current hit us, it spun us around like a top. The water deluged the folksal, and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep his feet. The next instant we were away down the river, clawing with might and maine to keep out of the woods. We tried the experiment four times. I stood on the folksal companion way to see. It was astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose. The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about the same if she had come full steam against a sand bank. Under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river, and the crash they made was not a bad effort at thunder. Once when we spun around we only missed a house about twenty feet that had a light burning in the window, and in the same instant that house went overboard. Nobody could stay on our folksal. The water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged to thwarp the current. At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles below the cut-off. All the country there was overflowed, of course. A day or two later the cut-off was three quarters of a mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so saved ten miles. The old Recursi cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles. There used to be a tradition connected with it. It was said that a boat came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made. It was a grisly hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted. The old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running away from mysterious reefs and occasionally hitting one. The perplexed pilots fell to swearing and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place. As always happens in such cases that particular prayer was answered, and the other is neglected. So to this day that phantom steamer is still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out. More than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly dismal nights he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the head of the island, and seen the faint glow of the spectre steamer's lights drifting through the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her scape-pipes and the plaintive cry of her ledsmen. In the absence of further statistics I beg to close this chapter with one more reminiscence of Stephen. Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen's note for borrowed sums ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward. Stephen never paid one of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about renewing them every twelve months. Of course there came a time at last when Stephen could no longer borrow of his ancient creditors, so he was obliged to lie and wait for new men who did not know him. Such a victim was good- hearted, simple-natured young Yates. I use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this one does, with a Y. Young Yates graduated as a pilot, got a birth, and when the month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk's office and received his two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, Stephen was there. His silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while Yates' two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands. The fact was soon known at pilot's headquarters, and the amusement and satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous. But innocent Yates never suspected that Stephen's promise to pay promptly at the end of the week was a worthless one. Yates called for his money at the stipulated time. Stephen sweetened him up and put him off a week. He called then, according to agreement, and came away sugarcoated again, but suffering under another postponement. So the thing went on. Yates haunted Stephen week after week to no purpose, and at last gave it up. And then, straight away, Stephen began to haunt Yates. Wherever Yates appeared there was the inevitable Stephen, and not only there, but beaming with affection and gushing with apologies for not being able to pay. By and by, whenever poor Yates saw him coming, he would turn and fly and drag his company with him, if he had company. But it was of no use. His debtor would run him down and corner him. Panting and red-faced, Stephen would come, with outstretched hands and eager eyes, invade the conversation, shake both of Yates' arms loose in their sockets, and begin. By what a race I've had! I saw you didn't see me, and so I clapped on all steam for fear I'd miss you entirely. And here you are. There, just stand so, and let me look at you. Just the same old noble countenance. To Yates' friend. Just look at him. Look at him! Ain't it just good to look at him? Ain't it now? Ain't he just a picture? Some call him a picture. I call him a panorama. That's what he is, an entire panorama! And now I'm reminded how I do wish I could have seen you an hour earlier. For twenty-four hours I've been saving up that two hundred and fifty dollars for you. Been looking for you everywhere. I waited at the planters from six yesterday evening till two o'clock this morning without rest or food. My wife says, Where have you been all night? I said, This debt lies heavy on my mind. She says, In all my days I never saw a man take a debt to heart the way you do. I said, It's my nature. How can I change it? She says, Well do go to bed and get some rest. I said, Not till that poor noble young man has got his money. So I set up all night and this morning out I shot. And the first man I struck told me you had shipped on the Grand Turk and gone to New Orleans. Well, sir, I had to lean up against a building and cry, so help me goodness I couldn't help it. The man that owned the place come out cleaning up with a rag and said he didn't like to have people cry against his building. And then it seemed to me that the whole world had turned against me, and it wasn't any use to live any more. And coming along an hour ago suffering no man knows what agony I met Jim Wilson and paid him the two hundred and fifty dollars on account. And to think that here you are now and I haven't got a cent. But as sure as I am standing here on this ground on this particular brick, there I've scratched a mark on the brick to remember it by. I'll borrow that money and pay it over to you at twelve o'clock sharp to-morrow. Now, stand so. Let me look at you just once more. And so on. Yates life became a burden to him. He could not escape his debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able to pay. He dreaded to show himself in the street lest he should find Stephen lying in wait for him at the corner. Bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days. They met there about as much to exchange river-news as to play. One morning Yates was there. Stephen was there too, but kept out of sight. But by and by, when about all the pilots had arrived who were in town, Stephen suddenly appeared in the midst and rushed for Yates as for a long-lost brother. Oh, I am so glad to see you! Oh, my soul, the sight of you is such comfort to my eyes! Gentlemen, I owe all of you money. Among you I owe probably forty thousand dollars. I want to pay it. I intend to pay it every last cent of it. You all know without my telling you what sorrow it has cost me to remain so long under such deep obligations to such patient and generous friends. But the sharpest pang I suffer, by far the sharpest, is from the debt I owe to this noble young man here. And I have come to this place this morning especially to make the announcement that I have at last found a method whereby I can pay off all my debts. And most especially I wanted him to be here when I announced it. Yes, my faithful friend, my benefactor, I've found the method. I've found the method to pay off all my debts and you'll get your money. Hope dawned in Yates' eye. Then Stephen, beaming benignantly and placing his hand upon Yates' head, outed, I am going to pay them off in alphabetical order. Then he turned and disappeared. The full significance of Stephen's method did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two minutes. Then Yates murmured with a sigh, Well! the wise stand a gaudy chance. He won't get any further than the seas in this world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted away in the next one, I'll still be referred to up there as that poor ragged pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days. CHAPTER XVIII During the two or two-and-a-half years of my apprenticeship I served under many pilots and had experience of many kinds of steamboat men and many varieties of steamboats. For it was not always convenient for Mr. Bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody else. I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience, for 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 born in upon me that the average shore-employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of an education. When I say I am still profiting by this thing, I do not mean that it has constituted me a judge of men. No, it has not done that, for judges of men are born not made. My profit is various in kind and degree. But the feature of it, which I value most, is the zest which that early experience has given to my later reading. 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. The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer Pennsylvania, the man referred to in a former chapter whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-hunting, moat-magnifying, tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul became led in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house. I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man. The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was straightening down. I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather and very proud to be semi-officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat. Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look round. I thought he took a frit of glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was picking his way among some dangerous breaks abreast the wood-yards. Therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him, so I stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat. There was a silence for ten minutes, then my new boss turned and inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about, as it seemed to me, a quarter of an hour. After which he removed his countenance, and I saw it no more for some seconds. Then it came round once more, and this question greeted me. Are you Horace Bixby's cub? Yes, sir. After this there was a pause and another inspection. Then what's your name? I told him, he repeated it after me. It was probably the only thing he ever forgot, for although I was with him many months he never addressed himself to me in any other way than here, and then his command followed. Where was you born? In Florida, Missouri. A pause, then. Dernsight better stayed there. By means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions he pumped my family history out of me. The leds were going now in the first crossing. This interrupted the inquest. When the leds had been laid in he resumed. How long have you been on the river? I told him. After a pause. Where'd you get them shows? I gave him the information. Hold up your foot. I did so. He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, well, I'll be dod-derned, and returned to his wheel. What occasion there was to be dod-derned about it is a thing which is still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. It must have been all of fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of dull, homesick silence. Before that long horse-face swung round upon me again, and then what a change! It was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working. Now came this shriek. Here! Are you going to sit there all day? I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric suddenness of the surprise. As soon as I could get my voice, I said, apologetically, I have had no orders, sir. You've had no orders? My, what a fine bird we are! We must have orders! Our father was a gentleman, owned slaves, and we've been to school! Yes, we are gentlemen, too, and got to have orders! Orders, is it? Orders is what you want? Dod-turn my skin! I'll learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here about your Dod-turned orders! Grave from the wheel! I had approached it without knowing it. I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream all my senses stupefied by this frantic assault. What are you standing there for? Take that ice-pitcher down till the Texas Tender come. Move along, and don't you be all day about it. The moment I got back to the pilot-house, Brown said, Here! What was you doing down there all this time? I couldn't find the Texas Tender. I had to go all the way to the pantry. Darn likely story! Fill up the stove! I proceeded to do so. He watched me like a cat. Presently, he shouted, Put down that shovel! Deadest numbskull I ever saw! Ain't even got sense enough to load up a stove! All through the watch this sort of thing went on. Yes, the subsequent watches were much like it during a stretch of months. As I have said, I soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread. The moment I was in the presence, even in the darkest night, I could feel those yellow eyes upon me and knew their owner was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on me. Preliminarily he would say, Here! Take the wheel! Two minutes later. Where in the nation are you going to? Pull her down! Pull her down! After another moment, say, You're going to hold her all day? Let her go! Meet her! Meet her! Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time. George Richie was the other pilot's cub. He was having good times now, for his boss, George Ealer, was as kind-hearted as Brown wasn't. Richie had steeled for Brown the season before. Consequently he knew exactly how to entertain himself and plague me all by the one operation. Whenever I took the wheel for a moment on Ealer's watch, Richie would sit back on the bench and play Brown, with continual ejaculations of, Snatcher! Snatcher! Darn this mudcat I ever saw! Here! Where are you going now? Going to run over that snag? Pull her down! Don't you hear me? Pull her down! There she goes, just as I expected. I told you not to cramp that reef away from the wheel. So I always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was. And sometimes it seemed to me that Richie's good-natured badgering was pretty nearly as aggravating as Brown's deaderness nagging. I often wanted to kill Brown, but this would not answer. A cub had to take everything his boss gave in the way of vigorous comment and criticism, and we all believed that there was a United States law making it a penitentiary offence to strike or threaten the pilot who was on duty. However, I could imagine myself killing Brown. There was no law against that, and that was the thing I used always to do the moment I was a bed. Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown every night for months, not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ways, ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastliness of situation and environment. Brown was always watching for a pretext to find fault, and if he could find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. He would scold you for shaving ashore, or for not shaving it, for hugging a bar, and for not hugging it, for pulling down when not invited, and for not pulling down when not invited, for firing up without orders, and for waiting for orders. In a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with everything you did, and another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks to you into the form of an insult. One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily laden. Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering. I was at the other, standing by to pull down or shove up. He cast a furtive glance at me every now and then. I had long ago learned what that meant. These he was trying to invent to trap for me. I wondered what shape it was going to take. By and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way, Here, see if you've got gumption enough to round her too! This was simply bound to be a success. Nothing could prevent it, for he had never allowed me to round the boat too before. Consequently, no matter how I might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. He stood back there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what might have been foreseen. I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn't know what I was about. I started too early to bring the boat around, but detected a green gleam of joy in Brown's eye, and corrected my mistake. I started round once more while too high up, but corrected myself again in time. I made other false moves, and still managed to save myself. But at last I grew so confused and anxious that I tumbled into the very worst blunder of all. I got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around. Brown's chance was come. His face turned red with passion. He made one bound, hurled me across the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to pour out a stream of entuperation upon me, which lasted till he was out of breath. In the course of this speech he called me all the different kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice I thought he was even going to swear, but he didn't this time. I had darned was the nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing, for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect for future fire and brimstone. That was an uncomfortable hour, for there was a big audience on the hurricane deck. When I went to bed that night I killed Brown in seventeen different ways. All of them knew. CHAPTER XIX two trips later I got into serious trouble. Brown was steering. I was pulling down. My younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck and shouted to Brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below. Brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything, but that was his way. He never condescended to take notice of an under-clerk. The wind was blowing. Brown was deaf, although he always pretended he wasn't, and I very much doubted if he had heard the order. If I had two heads I would have spoken, but as I had only one it seemed judicious to take care of it, so I kept still. Presently sure enough we went sailing by that plantation. Captain Kleinfelter appeared on the deck and said, "'Let her come round, sir. Let her come round. Didn't Henry tell you to land here?' "'No, sir.' I sent him up to do it. He did come up, and that's all the good had done.' The dad turned fool. He never said anything. "'Didn't you hear him?' asked the captain of me. Of course I didn't want to be mixed up in this business, but there was no way to avoid it, so I said, "'Yes, sir.' I knew what Brown's next remark would be before he uttered it. It was, "'Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind!' I closed my mouth according to instructions. An hour later Henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. He was a thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see him come, for I knew Brown would have no pity on him. Brown began a straight way. "'Here! Why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?' "'I did tell you, Mr. Brown.' "'It's a lie.' I said. "'You lie yourself. He did tell you.' Brown glared at me in unaffected surprise, and for as much as a moment he was entirely speechless. Then he shouted at me, "'I'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to Henry, and you leave the pilot-house. Out with you!' It was pilot-law, and must be obeyed. The boy started out, and even had his foot on the upper step outside the door when Brown, with a sudden access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal and sprang after him. But I was between with a heavy stool, and I hit Brown a good honest blow which stretched him out. I had committed the crime of crimes. I had lifted my hand against a pilot on duty. I supposed I was booked for the Penitentiary sure, and couldn't be booked any sure if I went on and squared my long account with this person while I had the chance. Consequently, I stuck to him and pounded him with my fists a considerable time. I did not know how long the pleasure of it probably made it seem longer than it really was. But in the end he struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel, a very natural solitude for all this time here was the steamboat tearing down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody at the helm. However, Eagle Bend was two miles wide at this bankful stage, and correspondingly long and deep, and the boat was steering herself straight down the middle and taking no chances. Still, that was only luck. A body might have found her charging into the woods. Perceiving, at a glance, that the Pennsylvania was in no danger, Brown gathered up the big spyglass, war-club fashion, and ordered me out of the pilot house with more than Comanche Bluster. But I was not afraid of him now, so instead of going, I tarried and criticized his grammar. I reformed his ferocious speeches for him and put them into good English, calling his attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard dialect of the Pennsylvania Collieries once he was extracted. He could have done his part to admiration in a crossfire of mere vituperation, of course, but he was not equipped for this species of controversy, so he presently laid aside his glass and took the wheel, muttering and shaking his head, and I retired to the bench. The racket had brought everybody to the hurricane-deck, and I trembled when I saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the crowd. I said to myself, Now I am done for. For although, as a rule, he was so fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family, and so patient of minor shortcomings, he could be stern enough when the fault was worth it. I tried to imagine what he would do to a cub pilot who had been guilty of such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard deep with costly freight and alive with passengers. Our watch was nearly ended. I thought I would go and hide somewhere till I got a chance to slide ashore. So I slipped out of the pilot-house and down the steps and around to the Texas door, and was in the act of gliding within when the captain confronted me. I dropped my head, and he stood over me in silence a moment or two, and then he said impressively, Follow me! I dropped into his wake. He led the way to his parlor in the forward end of the Texas. We were alone now. He closed the after-door, then moved slowly to the forward one and closed that. He sat down. I stood before him. He looked at me some little time, then said, So, you have been fighting Mr. Brown! I answered meekly, Yes, sir. Do you know that that is a very serious matter? Yes, sir. Are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully five minutes with no one at the wheel? Yes, sir. Did you strike him first? Yes, sir. What with? A stool, sir. Hard? Middling, sir. Did it knock him down? He fell, sir. Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further? Yes, sir. What did you do? Pounded him, sir. Pounded him? Yes, sir. Did you pound him much? That is, severely? One might call it that, sir, maybe. I'm dused glad of it. Harky! Never mentioned that I said that. You have been guilty of a great crime. And don't you ever be guilty of it again on this boat. But lay for him ashore. Give him a good sound thrashing. Do you hear? I'll pay the expense. Now go, and mind you, not a word of this to anybody. Clear out with you. You've been guilty of a great crime, you welp. I slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty deliverance. And I heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat thighs after I had closed his door. When Brown came off watch he went straight to the captain, who was talking with some passengers on the boiler deck, and demanded that I be put ashore in New Orleans, and added, I'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that club stays. The captain said, But he needn't go round when you are on watch, Mr. Brown. I won't even stay on the same boat with him. One of us has got to go ashore. Very well, said the captain. Let it be yourself, and resumed his talk with the passengers. During the brief remainder of the trip I knew how an emancipated slave feels, for I was an emancipated slave myself. While we lay at landings I listened to George Eler's flute, or to his readings from his two Bibles, that is to say, Goldsmith and Shakespeare. Or I played chess with him, and would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back his last move and ran the game out differently. CHAPTER XXXI A CATASTROPHY We lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed in finding another pilot, so he proposed that I should stand a daylight watch, and leave the night watches to George Eler. But I was afraid. I had never stood a watch of any sort by myself, and I believed I should be sure to get into trouble in the head of some chute or ground the boat in a near cut through some bar or other. Brown remained in his place, but he would not travel with me. So the captain gave me an order on the captain of the A.T. Lacey for a passage to St. Louis, and said he would find a new pilot there, and my steersman's birth could then be resumed. The Lacey was to leave a couple of days after the Pennsylvania. The night before the Pennsylvania left, Henry and I sat chatting on a freight-pile on the levee till midnight. The subject of the chat mainly was one which I think we had not exploited before—steam-boat disasters. One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it. The water which was to make the steam which should cause it was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked, but it would arrive at the right time and the right place. We doubted if persons not closed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic. Still they might be of some use, so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this afterward when the disaster came and acted accordingly. The Lacey started up the river two days behind the Pennsylvania. We touched at Greenville, Mississippi a couple of days out and somebody shouted, The Pennsylvania is blown up at Ship Island and a hundred and fifty lives lost! At Napoleon, Arkansas the same evening we got an extra issued by a Memphis paper which gave some particulars. It mentioned my brother and said he was not hurt. Further up the river we got a later extra. My brother was again mentioned, but this time as being hurt beyond help. We did not get full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis. This is the sorrowful story. It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. The Pennsylvania was creeping along north of Ship Island about sixty miles below Memphis on a half head of steam, towing a wood flat which was fast being emptied. George Ealer was in the pilot house alone, I think. The second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine room. The second mate had the watch on deck. George Black, Mr. Wood, and my brother, clerks, were of sleep, as were also Brown and the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker. Captain Kleinfelter was in the barber's chair and the barber was preparing to shave him. There were a good many cabin passengers aboard and three or four hundred deck passengers, so it was said at the time, and not very many of them were a stir. The wood, being nearly all out of the flat now, Ealer rang to come ahead full steam, and the next moment, four of the eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash, and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky. The main part of the mass with the chimneys dropped upon the boat again, a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish, and then after a while a fire broke out. Many people were flung to considerable distances and fell in the river. Among these were Mr. Wood and my brother and the carpenter. The carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the water seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot, and George Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion. The barber's chair with Captain Kleinfelter in it, and Unhurt, was left with its back overhanging vacancy. Everything forward of it floor and all had disappeared, and the stupefied barber, who was also Unhurt, stood with one toe projecting over space, still stirring his lather unconsciously and saying not a word. When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he knew what the matter was, so he muffled his face in the lapels of his coat and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth. He had ample time to attend to these details while he was going up and returning. He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers forty feet below the former pilot house, accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam. All of the many who breathed that steam died. None escaped. But Ealer breathed none of it. He made his way to the free air as quickly as he could, and when the steam cleared away he returned and climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted out each and every one of his chestmen and the several joints of his flute. By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks and groans filled the air. A great many persons had been scalded, a great many crippled. The explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's body. I think they said he was a priest. He did not die at once, and his sufferings were very dreadful. A young French naval cadet of fifteen, son of a French admiral, was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully. Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to their posts nevertheless. They drew the woodboat aft, and they and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed in safety first. When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water they struck out for shore, which was only a few hundred yards away, but Henry presently said he believed he was not hurt. What an unaccountable error! And therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. So they parted, and Henry returned. By this time the fire was making fierce headway and several persons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging pitiously for help. All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless, so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officers fell to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners out. A striker was one of the captives. He said he was not injured, but could not free himself, and when he saw that the fire was likely to drive away the workers he begged that someone would shoot him and thus save him from the more dreadful death. The fire did drive the ax-men away, and they had to listen helpless to this poor fellow's supplications to the flames ended his miseries. The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there. It was cut adrift then, and it and the burning steamer floated down the river toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the head of the island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked occupants had to remain without food or stimulants or help for their hurts during the rest of the day. A steamer came along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to Memphis, and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming. By this time Henry was insensible. The physicians examined his injuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their main attention to patients who could be saved. Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great public hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphis came every day with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded. All the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students, and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted, and Memphis knew how to do all these things well, for many a disaster like the Pennsylvania's had happened near her doors, and she was experienced above all other cities on the river in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan. The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me. Two long rows of prostrate forms, more than forty in all, and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose, raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle. I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing. This was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It was done in order that the morale of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death agony. The fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistance. But no matter, everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms with its muffled step and its slow movement meant, and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave. I saw many poor fellows removed to the death room, and saw them no more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once. His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human. He was often out of his mind, and then his pains would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of numb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a folksal and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew, and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, Hump yourselves! Hump yourselves, you petrifactions! Snail bellies! Paul-bearers! Going to be all day getting that hatful of freight out and supplement this explosion with affirmament obliterating eruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then, while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was bad for the others, of course, this noise and these exhibitions. So the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But in his mind or out of it he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by that treacherous drug and he would die before he would take it. He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his water, so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid and the misery of his thirst tempted him almost beyond his strength. But he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him carried to the death-room insensible and supposed to be dying, but each time he revived cursed his attendants and demanded to be taken back. He lived to be made of a steamboat again. But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive. Dr. Payton, a principal physician and rich in all the attributes that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated judgment and train-skill could do for Henry. But as the newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away, and his nervless fingers picked at his coverlet. His hour had struck. We bore him to the death-room, poor boy. CHAPTER XXI A section in my biography. In due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full-fledged. I dropped into casual employments, no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. 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. I had to seek another livelihood, so I became a silver miner in Nevada, next a newspaper reporter, next a gold miner in California, next a reporter in San Francisco, next a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, next a roving correspondent in Europe and the East, next an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture-platform, and finally I became a scribbler of books and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England. In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot-house. Let us resume now. CHAPTER XXII After twenty-one years' absence I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left, so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to take him down, and started westward about the middle of April. As I proposed to make notes with a view to printing, I took some thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized on the river I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around as I should be if unknown. I remembered that it was the custom of steamboat men in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts. So I concluded that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother, for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted. How do criminals manage to keep a brand new alias in mind? This is a great mystery. I was innocent, and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed, and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me I could never have kept the name by me at all. We left per Pennsylvania Railroad at 8AM April 18. Evening, speaking of dress, grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York. I find that among my notes. It makes no difference which direction you take. The fact remains the same whether you move north, south, east, or west no matter. You can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers. I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that carriage is at the bottom of this thing, and I think it is, for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York. Yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact. The educated eye never mistakes those people for New Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace and snap and style about a born and bred New Yorker which mere clothing cannot affect. April 19. This morning struck into the region of full goatees, sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally. It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncommonly fashion. It was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation. The goatee extends over a wide extent of country and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists. Afternoon. At the railway stations the loafers carry both hands in their bridge's pockets. It was observable here to fore that one hand was sometimes out of doors. Here, never. This is an important fact in geography. If the loafers determined the character of a country it would be still more important, of course. Here to fore, all along, the station loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot. Here these remains of activity are wanting. This was an ominous look. By and by we entered the tobacco-chewing region. Fifty years ago the tobacco-chewing region covered the Union. It is greatly restricted now. Next boots began to appear. Not in strong force, however. Later, away down the Mississippi they became the rule. They disappeared from other sections of the Union with the mud. No doubt they will disappear from the river villages also when proper pavements come in. We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counter of the hotel I tendered a hurriedly invented fictitious name with a miserable attempt at careless ease. The clerk paused and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances. Then he said, It's all right. I know what sort of a room you want. Used to clerk at the St. James in New York. An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. We started to the supper room and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere. How odd and unfair it is. Wicked imposters go around lecturing under my nom de guerre and nobody suspects them, but when an honest man attempts an imposture he is exposed at once. One thing seemed plain. We must start down the river the next day if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate an unpalatable disappointment for we had hoped to have a week in St. Louis. The Southern was a good hotel and we could have had a comfortable time there. It is large and well conducted and its decorations do not make one cry as do those of the vast Palmer House in Chicago. True, the billiard tables were of the old Silurian period and the cues and balls of the post-Pliocene, but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort, for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities. The most notable absence observable in the billiard room was the absence of the river-man. If he was there he had taken in his sign. He was in disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces and ostentatious displays of money and pompous squanderings of it which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dryland crowd in the bygone days in the thronged billiard rooms of St. Louis. In those times the principal saloons were always populous with river-men, given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now and the steamboat men no longer an aristocracy. In my time they used to call the barkeep Bill or Joe or Tom and slap him on the shoulder. I watched for that, but none of these people did it. Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in these twenty-one years. When I went up to my room I found there the young man called Rogers crying. Rogers was not his name, neither was Jones Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Baskham, nor Thompson, but he answered to either of these that a body found handy in an emergency or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you meant him. He said, What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water? Drink this slush. Can't you drink it? I could if I had some other water to wash it with. Here was a thing which had not changed. A score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least. A score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent bank-caving Missouri, and every tumbler full of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis, and then you will find them both good. The one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger, the other thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass, they stir it up, and then take the draft, as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating and good to drink, but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing. Next morning we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so. Because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new. The coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size, since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of four hundred thousand inhabitants. Still, in the solid business parts it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet, I am sure there is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very much thinner now. Still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think. I heard no complaint. However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough. Notably in dwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautiful and modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them, whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks, and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched framework of twisted stone, a sort of house which was handsome enough when it was rarer. There was another change—the Forest Park. This was new to me. It is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit of having been made mainly by nature. There are other parks and fine ones, notably Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens. For St. Louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities. The first time I ever saw St. Louis I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable today, at a first glance, yet there were reasons at the time to justify this course. A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or fifty years ago, said, The streets are narrow, ill-paved and ill-lighted. Those streets are narrow still, of course. Many of them are ill-paved yet, but the reproach of ill-lighting cannot be repeated now. The Catholic New Church was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was confidently called upon to admire it, with its species of Grecian porticoes surmounted by a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmounted by sundry ornaments, which the unimaginative Scotchman found himself quite unable to describe, and therefore was grateful when a German tourist helped him out with the exclamation by They look exactly like bed-posts. St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now, and the little church which the people used to be so proud of, lost its importance a long time ago. Still this would not surprise Mr. Murray, if he could come back, for he prophesized the coming greatness of St. Louis with strong confidence. The further we drove in our inspection tour, the more sensibly I realized how the city had grown since I had seen it last. Changes in detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too. Changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity. But the change of changes was on the levee, this time a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones. This was melancholy. This was woeful. The absence of the pervading and jockened steamboat man from the billiard saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone. His power has passed away. He is absorbed into the common herd. He grinds at the mill. A shorn sampson, an inconspicuous. Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched to sleep in a wide and soundless vacancy where the seared hosts of commerce used to contend. Footnote. Captain Mariat, writing forty-five years ago, says St. Louis has twenty thousand inhabitants. The river abreast of the town is crowded with steamboats lying in two or three tiers. Here was desolation indeed. The old, old sea as one in tears comes murmuring with foamy lips and knocking at the vacant pier's calls for his long lost multitude of ships. The tow-boat and the railroad had done their work and done it well and completely. The mighty bridge stretching along over our heads had done its share in the slaughter and expoliation. Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with one satisfaction, that the bridge doesn't pay. Still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse to know that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be. The pavements along the riverfront were bad. The sidewalks were rather out of repair. There was a rich abundance of mud. All this was familiar and satisfying, but the ancient armies of drays and struggling throngs of men and mountains of freight were gone, and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The immemorial mile of cheap foul daugheries remained, but business was dull with them. The multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep. St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city, but the river edge of it seems dead past resurrection. Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812. At the end of thirty years it had grown to mighty proportions, and in less than thirty more it was dead. A strangely short life for so majestic a creature, of course it is not absolutely dead. Neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground. But as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may be called dead. It killed the old-fashioned keel boating by reducing the freight trip to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing, and the towing fleets have killed the through freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer loads of stuff down the river at a time at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question. Freight and passenger-way traffic remains to the steamers. This is in the hands, along the two thousand miles of river between St. Paul and New Orleans, of two or three close corporations well fortified with capital, and by able and thoroughly business-like management and system these make a sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry. I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially by the change, but alas for the woodyard man. He used to fringe the river all the way, his close-ranked merchandise stretched from the one city to the other along the banks, and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail, but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi today is a woodpile. Where now is the once woodyard man? End of Chapter 22 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Chapter 23 Travelling in Cognito My idea was to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis and New Orleans. To do this it would be necessary to go from place to place by the short packet lines. It was an easy plan to make, and would have been an easy one to follow twenty years ago, but not now. There are wide intervals between boats these days. I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements of Saint-Jean-Vierve and Cascasquia sixty miles below St. Louis. There was only one boat advertised for that section, a Grand Tower packet. Still one boat was enough, so we went down to look at her. She was a venerable rack-heap, and a fraud to boot, for she was playing herself for personal property, whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her that she was righteously taxable as real estate. There are places in New England where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. The soil on her folksal was quite good. The new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. The companion way was of a dry, sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes, with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling. The soil of the boiler deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes. A colored boy was on watch here, nobody else visible. We gathered from him that this calm craft would go as advertised if she got her trip. If she didn't get it she would wait for it. Has she got any of her trip? Bless you, no, boss! She ain't unloaded yet. She only come in this mornin'. He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it might be to-morrow or maybe next day. This would not answer at all. So we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm. We had one more arrow in our quiver. A Vicksburg packet, the gold dust, was to leave at five p.m. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave up the idea of stopping off here and there as being impracticable. She was neat, clean and comfortable. We camped on the boiler deck, and bought some cheap literature to kill time with. The vendor was a venerable Irishman with a benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily in the socket, and from him we learned that he had lived in St. Louis thirty-four years and had never been across the river during that period. Then he wandered into a very flowing lecture filled with classic names and allusions, which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather apparent that this was not the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth time, that the speech had been delivered. He was a good deal of a character and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling. A random remark connecting Irish men and beer brought this nugget of information out of him. They don't drink it, sir. They can't drink it, sir. Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper, and is the saving of him, sir. At eight o'clock promptly we backed out and crossed the river. As we crept toward the shore in the thick darkness, a blinding glory of white electric light burst suddenly from our folksle, and lit up the water and the warehouses as with a noonday glare. Another big change this. No more flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual torch-baskets now. Their day is past. Next, instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended, launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing was over and done with, before a mate in the olden time could have got his profanity mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. Why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the first steamboat was built is a mystery which helps one to realize what a dull-witted slug the average human being is. We finally got away at two in the morning, and when I turned out at six we were rounding two at a rocky point where there was an old stone warehouse, at any rate the ruins of it. Two or three decayed dwelling-houses were nearby in the shelter of the leafy hills, but there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen. I wondered if I had forgotten the river, for I had no recollection whatever of this place. The shape of the river too was unfamiliar. There was nothing in sight anywhere that I could remember ever having seen before. I was surprised, disappointed, and annoyed. We put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed lady like young girls, together with sundry Russian letter-bags. A strange place for such folk. No carriage was waiting. The party moved off as if they had not expected any, and struck down a winding country road afoot. But the mystery was explained when we got underway again. For these people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind a tow-head, i.e. New Island, a couple of miles below this landing. I couldn't remember that town. I couldn't place it, couldn't call its name. So I lost part of my temper. I suspected it might be St. Genevieve, and so it proved to be. Observe what this eccentric river had been about. It had built up this huge, useless tow-head directly in front of this town. Cut off its river communications, fenced it away completely, and made a country town of it. It is a fine old place too, and deserved a better fate. It was settled by the French, and is a relic of a time when one could travel from the miles of the Mississippi to Quebec, and be on French territory, and under French rule all the way. Presently I ascended to the hurricane-deck, and cast a longing glance toward the pilot-house.