the craft.

I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and
'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,'
in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys
equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and
presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural
and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no
break in my river life. There was a 'cub,' and I judged that he
would take the wheel now; and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the
pilot-house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He
made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat
and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen, because
I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain
looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and
crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth
of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a
quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever
steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere
pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim.

We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a
half--much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of
water.

The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie
successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance
the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself. This
sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart.

By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the
reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six
hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree
itself. The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding
fog, were very pretty things to see.

We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and
still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned
energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was
accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the
tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent
the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and
gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing