WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have precededthis may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science.

It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet.

I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderfulscience it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it isa comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers,with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and thereforeone needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matterwhen you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri,whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are alwayshunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channelsare for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must beconfronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a singlelight-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to befound anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainousriver. Ifeel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that Ifeel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloteda steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject.

If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently withthe reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take upa considerable degree of room with it.

When I had learned the name and position of every visiblefeature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that Icould shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans;when I had learned to read the face of the water as one wouldcull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when Ihad trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless arrayof soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them,I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tiltingmy cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in mymouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs.

One day he said--'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?'

'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.'

'Very poor eye--very poor. Take the glass.'

I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell.

I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.'

'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bankalong here last trip?'

'I don't know; I never noticed.'

'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.'

'Why?'

'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you.

For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whetherthere's more water or less in the river along here than therewas last trip.'

'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantageof him there.

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