mptly aver--not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that
lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go
here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has
sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not
tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put
these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not
their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their
abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and
handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific
man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,
with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which
seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and
say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and
undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into
right and reasonable conduct.

I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I
give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be
relied on as being full and correct; except that I have here and there
left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in
blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to
break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding
to its information or its clearness. Not that I have ventured to
strike out all such interjections; I have removed only those which were
obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which I felt any question
about, I have judged it safest to let it remain.

UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS

Uncle Mumford said--

'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--I have
watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about
it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHAT ARE YOU
SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS! Four years
at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a
good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river. You turn one
of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard
bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to
wall it, and pile it, and dike i