oal soundings
and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike.
You must keep them separate."

When I came to myself again, I said:

"When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead,
and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want
to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush;
I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a
pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them
around, unless I went on crutches."

"Now drop that! When I say I'll learn a man the river I mean it.
And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him."

We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very
positive importance here. It is one of the most luminous in the book so
far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows
better than could any other combination of words something of what is
required of the learner. It does not cover the whole problem, by any
means--Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering
his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still
incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he
did, against such obstacles.

XXIV. THE RIVER CURRICULUM

He acquired other kinds of knowledge. As the streets of Hannibal in
those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught
him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished
an added course to that vigorous education. Morally, its atmosphere
could not be said to be an improvement on the others. Navigation in the
West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude,
hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports,
coarse in their wit, profane in everything. Steam-boatmen were the
natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought
less profane, a veneer less barbaric. But these things were mainly
"above stairs." You had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to
find the old keel-boatman savagery. Captains were overlords, and
pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. In Life on the
Mississippi Clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells
us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. It was easier
to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One
could improve upon them, too, wit