as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the
bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements
were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from
nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed,
the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or
suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better
how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the
novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute
in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of
eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain
destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with
apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference, in that
particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit
it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will
easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he
was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with
marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all
the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly
communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only
people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in
the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one's own
grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects.

By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of
commands. It 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape
of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.
In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New
Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five
days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the
wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard
at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up
town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The
moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and
they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and
everything in readiness for another voyage.

When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he
took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred