In due course I got my license. I was a
pilot now, full fledged. I dropped into casual
employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent
work gave place to steady and protracted engagements.
Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed—and
hoped—that I was going to follow the river
the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my
mission was ended. But by and by the war came,
commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.
I had to seek another livelihood. So I became
a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter;
next, a gold miner, in California; next, a reporter
in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in
the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent
in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer
on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a
scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among
the other rocks of New England.
In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one
slow-drifting years that have come and gone since
I last looked from the windows of a pilot-house.
Let us resume, now.
After twenty-one years’ absence, I felt
a very strong desire to see the river again, and the
steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left;
so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet
for company, and a stenographer to ‘take him
down,’ and started westward about the middle
of April.
As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing,
I took some thought as to methods of procedure.
I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river,
I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire,
and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered
that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old
times to load up the confiding stranger with the most
picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated
friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so
I concluded, that, from a business point of view,
it would be an advantage to disguise our party with
fictitious names. The idea was certainly good,
but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones,
and Johnson are easy names to remember when there
is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible
to recollect them when they are wanted. How do
criminals manage to keep a brand-new Alias in
mind? This is a great mystery. I was innocent;
and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name
when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if I had
had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me,
I could never have kept the name by me at all.
We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M.
April 18.
’Evening. Speaking of dress.
Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it
as one travels away from New York.’
