to himself, that they were anything more than
heavenly impossibilities. But as he worked during the winter in the
printing-office of Wrightson & Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his
leisure hours reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations
of the Amazon, and became greatly interested in his description of the
cocoa industry. Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling
career. The expedition sent out by the government to explore the Amazon
had encountered difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the
country about the head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the
river. It mattered not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred
miles away from Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left.
His mind was made up he would go on and complete the work of
exploration. So in April, 1857, he set sail for New Orleans on an
ancient tub, called the Paul Jones. For the paltry sum of sixteen
dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined glories of the main
saloon. At last he was under way--realizing his boyhood dream, unable
to contain himself for joy. At last he saw himself as that hero of his
boyish fancy--a traveller.

When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on
a tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for
Para, that there never had been one leaving for Para and that there
probably would not be one leaving for Para that century. A policeman
made him, move, on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him
reflecting in the public street again. Just as his money failed him,
his old friend circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his
life--a new link. On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he
turned to him in this hour of need. It has been charged against Mark
Twain that he was deplorably lazy--apocryphal anecdotes are still
narrated with much gusto to prove it. Think of a lazy boy undertaking
the stupendous task of learning to know the intricate and treacherous
secrets of the great river, to know every foot of the route in the dark
as well as he knew his own face in the glass! And yet he confesses that
he was unaware of the immensity of the undertaking upon which he had
embarked.

"In 1852," says Bixby, "I was chief pilot on the 'Paul Jones', a boat
that made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans. One day a
tall, angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be