and
personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's
family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in
it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry
provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that one of these
events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter' of such and such a
year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with
the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the
high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest
corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; cows and
horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders;
the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural;
from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course
the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or
four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go out
of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years
before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the
original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,
after all this waiting and hungering.

A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he
must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a
cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle
of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot
be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite
say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man
must START with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as
a pilot.

The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it
does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after
the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,' alone and under
the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the
position. When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted
with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his
steamboat, night or day, that he presently begins to imagine that it is
HIS courage that animates him; but the first time the pilot steps out
and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's.
He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo
altoget