dollars' worth. He
said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars;
offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug-
hat; said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. But
I was a burnt child, and resisted all these temptations--resisted
them easily; went off with my money, and next day lent five thousand
of it to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later."

It was the chance of fortune thus thrown away which, perhaps, led him to
take up later with an engraving process--an adventure which lasted
through several years and ate up a heavy sum. Altogether, these
experiences in finance cost Mark Twain a fair-sized fortune, though,
after all, they were as nothing compared with the great type-machine
calamity which we shall hear of in a later chapter.

XLIII

BACK TO THE RIVER, WITH BIXBY

Fortunately, Mark Twain was not greatly upset by his losses. They
exasperated him for the moment, perhaps, but his violence waned
presently, and the whole matter was put aside forever. His work went on
with slight interference. Looking over his Mississippi chapters one day,
he was taken with a new interest in the river, and decided to make the
steamboat trip between St. Louis and New Orleans, to report the changes
that had taken place in his twenty-one years of absence. His Boston
publisher, Osgood, agreed to accompany him, and a stenographer was
engaged to take down conversations and comments.

At St. Louis they took passage on the steamer "Gold Dust"--Clemens under
an assumed name, though he was promptly identified. In his book he tells
how the pilot recognized him and how they became friends. Once, in later
years, he said:

"I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below
Cairo, where there was a big, full river--for it was high-water
season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long
as she kept in the river--I had her most of the time on his watch.
He would lie down and sleep and leave me there to dream that the
years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining
days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and
care-free as I had been twenty years before."

To heighten the illusion he had himself called regularly with the
four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. The points along
the river were nearly all new to him, everything had changed,