WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfullyhot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished.

I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen,but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that Igot nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozenof the craft.

I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,'

in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneysequally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum,and presently were fairly under way and booming along.

It was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a 'cub,'

and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did.

Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot-house. Presently the cubclosed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous,for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships.

I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could dateback in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on,during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself,and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along withina band-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he haddone me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot,the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans.

It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim.

We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half--much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water.

The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchiesuccessfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for hisguidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself.

This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart.

By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflectionof a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundredyards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself.

The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog,were very pretty things to see.

We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg,and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They hadan old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me.

This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bankwhen we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me.

The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale undersideof the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession,thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that,and creating swift waves of alternating green and white accordingto the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves racedafter each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats.

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