’As long as I have been mate of a steamboat—­thirty years—­I have watched this river and studied it.  Maybe I could have learnt more about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be what are you sucking your fingers there for ?—­Collar that KAG of nails!  Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, I reckon, but it won’t learn him the river.  You turn one of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time.  But this ain’t that kind of a river.  They have started in here with big confidence, and the best intentions in the world; but they are going to get left.  What does Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say?  Says enough to knock their little game galley-west, don’t it?  Now you look at their methods once.  There at Devil’s Island, in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go another.  So they put up a stone wall.  But what does the river care for a stone wall?  When it got ready, it just bulged through it.  Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up there—­but not down here they can’t.  Down here in the Lower River, they drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing off the bank; very well, don’t it go straight over and cut somebody else’s bank?  Certainly.  Are they going to peg all the banks?  Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper.  They are pegging Bulletin Tow-head now.  It won’t do any good.  If the river has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs.  Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low.  What do you reckon that is for?  If I know, I wish I may land in-hump yourself, you son of an undertaker!—­Out with that coal-oil, now, lively, lively!  And just look at what they are trying to do down there at Milliken’s Bend.  There’s been a cut-off in that section, and Vicksburg is left out in the cold.  It’s a country town now.  The river strikes in below it; and a boat can’t go up to the town except in high water.  Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used to do, and fetch the town