que and truthful story
of the old-time pilot's life. The pilot began his work in boyhood as a
"cub" to a licensed pilot. His duties ranged from bringing refreshments up
to the pilot-house, to holding the wheel when some straight stretch or
clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a
few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to
the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote
some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other
philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit
to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or
bayou mouth, "cut-off," light, plantation and hamlet on either bank of the
river all the way to St. Louis. Then, he had to learn them all in their
opposite order, quite an independent task, as all of us who learned the
multiplication table backward in the days of our youth, will readily
understand. These landmarks it was needful for him to recognize by day and
by night, through fog or driving rain, when the river was swollen by
spring floods, or shrunk in summer to a yellow ribbon meandering through a
Sahara of sand. He had need to recognize at a glance the ripple on the
water that told of a lurking sand-bar and distinguish it from the almost
identical ripple that a brisk breeze would raise. Most perplexing of the
perils that beset river navigation are the "snags," or sunken logs that
often obstruct the channel. Some towering oak or pine, growing in lusty
strength for its half-century or more by the brink of the upper reaches of
one of the Mississippi system would, in time, be undermined by the flood
and fall into the rushing tide. For weeks it would be rolled along the
shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking
short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its
fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of
boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while
the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward
obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water,
which--too thick to drink and too thin to plough, as the old saying
went--gave no hint of this concealed peril; but the boat running fairly
upon it, would have her bows stove in and go quickly to the bottom. After
the United States took control of the river and beg