Life on the Mississippi, Part 4. eBook

’Oh, I am so glad to see you!  Oh my soul, the sight of you is such a comfort to my eyes!  Gentlemen, I owe all of you money; among you I owe probably forty thousand dollars.  I want to pay it; I intend to pay it every last cent of it.  You all know, without my telling you, what sorrow it has cost me to remain so long under such deep obligations to such patient and generous friends; but the sharpest pang I suffer—­by far the sharpest—­is from the debt I owe to this noble young man here; and I have come to this place this morning especially to make the announcement that I have at last found a method whereby I can pay off all my debts!  And most especially I wanted him to be here when I announced it.  Yes, my faithful friend,—­my benefactor, I’ve found the method!  I’ve found the method to pay off all my debts, and you’ll get your money!’ Hope dawned in Yates’s eye; then Stephen, beaming benignantly, and placing his hand upon Yates’s head, added, ’I am going to pay them off in alphabetical order!’

Then he turned and disappeared.  The full significance of Stephen’s ‘method’ did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two minutes; and then Yates murmured with a sigh—­

’Well, the Y’s stand a gaudy chance.  He won’t get any further than the C’s in this world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted away in the next one, I’ll still be referred to up there as “that poor, ragged pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days!”

Chapter 18 I Take a Few Extra Lessons

During the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, I served under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboatmen and many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always convenient for Mr. Bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody else.  I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history.  The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore-employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of an education.  When I say I am still profiting by this thing, I do not mean that it has constituted me a judge of men—­no, it has not done that; for judges of men are born, not made.  My profit is various in kind and degree; but the feature of it which I value most is the zest which that early experience has given to my later reading.  When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—­met him on the river.