couldn’t remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property and ‘shook’ him as he phrased it.  After his mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of ‘loblolly-boy in a ship;’ and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.

It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he had come to believe it himself.

Chapter 6 A Cub-pilot’s Experience

What with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other delays, the poor old ‘Paul Jones’ fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans.  This gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever for me.

It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken deck passage—­more’s the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after we should arrive.  But he probably died or forgot, for he never came.  It was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy, and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [1.  ‘Deck’ Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]}

I soon discovered two things.  One was that a vessel would not be likely to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not suffice for so imposing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship.  Therefore it followed that I must contrive a new career.  The ‘Paul Jones’ was now bound for St. Louis.  I planned a siege against my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he surrendered.  He agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after graduating.  I entered upon the small enterprise of ‘learning’ twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life.  If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin.  I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide.