We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip.  There were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great pilot-house.  Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots.  They were choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots.  The others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth.

I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid.  I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood nearest did that when occasion required—­and this was pretty much all the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water.  I stood in a corner; and the talk I listened to took the hope all out of me.  One visitor said to another—­

‘Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?’

’It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the “Diana” told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef—­quarter less twain—­then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming—­nine and a half.’

‘Pretty square crossing, an’t it?’

’Yes, but the upper bar ‘s working down fast.’

Another pilot spoke up and said—­

’I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point—­mark twain—­raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.’

One of the gorgeous ones remarked—­

’I don’t want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that’s a good deal of water for Plum Point, it seems to me.’

There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on the boaster and ‘settled’ him.  And so they went on talk-talk-talking.  Meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, ’Now if my ears hear aright, I have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark, unless these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid blackness; I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had never thought of it.’

At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to land), and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward end of the texas, and looked up inquiringly.  Mr. Bixby said—­