cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash they made was not a bad effort at thunder.  Once, when we spun around, we only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the window; and in the same instant that house went overboard.  Nobody could stay on our forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current.  At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was overflowed, of course.  A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so saved ten miles.

The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river’s length twenty-eight miles.  There used to be a tradition connected with it.  It was said that a boat came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made.  It was a grisly, hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted.  The old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running away from mysterious reefs, and occasionally hitting one.  The perplexed pilots fell to swearing, and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place.  As always happens in such cases, that particular prayer was answered, and the others neglected.  So to this day that phantom steamer is still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out.  More than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly, dismal nights, he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the head of the island, and seen the faint glow of the specter steamer’s lights drifting through the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her ’scape-pipes and the plaintive cry of her leadsmen.

In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this chapter with one more reminiscence of ‘Stephen.’

Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen’s note for borrowed sums, ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward.  Stephen never paid one of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about renewing them every twelve months.

Of course there came a time, at last, when Stephen could no longer borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was obliged to lie in wait for new men who did not know him.  Such a victim was good-hearted, simple natured young Yates (I use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this one does, with a Y).  Young Yates graduated as a pilot, got a berth, and when the month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk’s office and received his two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, Stephen was there!  His silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while Yates’s two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands.  The fact was soon known at pilot headquarters, and the amusement and satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous.  But innocent Yates never suspected