ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almostwholly to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water,we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of bigcoal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddlingalong from farm to farm, with the peddler's family on board;possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble Hamlet and Co.

on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all absent.

Far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more.

She was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouthof the Obion River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that shewas named for me--or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer.

As this was the first time I had ever encountered this speciesof honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same timecall the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of myrecognition of it.

Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large island,and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to the mainshore now, and has retired from business as an island.

As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell,but that was nothing to shudder about--in these modem times.

For now the national government has turned the Mississippiinto a sort of two-thousand-mile torchlight procession.

In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of everycrossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp.

You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beaconin sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast.

One might almost say that lamps have been squandered there.

Dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoalwhen they were created, and have never been shoal since;crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboatcan take herself through them without any help, after she has beenthrough once. Lamps in such places are of course not wasted;it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to holdon them than on a spread of formless blackness that won'tstay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time,for she can of course make more miles with her rudderamidships than she can with it squared across her stern andholding her back.

But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.

It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it.

For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was.

The government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in thesematter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted outall the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and theyallow no new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you,on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you;so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidifieddarkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash outyour electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye,and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and GeorgeRitchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass;they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole.

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