take the watch, and
he said:

"Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's island, and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,
you wouldn't know the point about 40. You can go up inside the old
sycamore snag now."

So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed
pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man
had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know;
and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a
different way every twenty-four hours.

I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the
eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or
hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp,
wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of
me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and
just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw
up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and
fold back into the bank!

It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all
the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end
first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"--and then know
what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set
about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this
knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.
Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He
opened on me after this fashion:

"How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-The-
Wall, trip before last?"

I considered this an outrage. I said:

"Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that
tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do
you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?"

"My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the
exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the
shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places
between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal
soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the sh