Young Clemens had been on the river nearly a year at this time, and, though he had learned a good deal and was really a fine steersman, he received no wages.  He had no board to pay, but there were things he must buy, and his money supply had become limited.  Each trip of the “Pennsylvania” she remained about two days and nights in New Orleans, during which time the young man was free.  He found he could earn two and a half to three dollars a night watching freight on the levee, and, as this opportunity came around about once a month, the amount was useful.  Nor was this the only return; many years afterward he said: 

“It was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark, among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir.  But it was not a profitless one.  I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights.  I used to imagine all sots of situations and possibilities.  These things got into my books by and by, and furnished me with many a chapter.  I can trace the effects of those nights through most of my books, in one way and another.”

Piloting, even with Brown, had its pleasant side.  In St. Louis, young Clemens stopped with his sister, and often friends were there from Hannibal.  At both ends of the line he visited friendly boats, especially the “Roe,” where a grand welcome was always waiting.  Once among the guests of that boat a young girl named Laura so attracted him that he forgot time and space until one of the “Roe” pilots, Zeb Leavenworth, came flying aft, shouting: 

“The “Pennsylvania” is backing out!”

A hasty good-by, a wild flight across the decks of several boats, and a leap across several feet of open water closed the episode.  He wrote to Laura, but there was no reply.  He never saw her again, never heard from her for nearly fifty years, when both were widowed and old.  She had not received his letter.

Occasionally there were stirring adventures aboard the “Pennsylvania.”  In a letter written in March, 1858, the young pilot tells of an exciting night search in the running ice for Hat Island soundings: 

Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow with an oar, to keep her head out, and I took the tiller.  We would start the men, and all would go well until the yawl would bring us on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat.  After an hour’s hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars . . . .  The next day was colder still.  I was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us . . . .  The “Maria Denning” was aground at the head of the island; they hailed us; we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out.  We had been out in the yawl from four in the morning until half-past nine without being near a fire.  There was a thick coating of ice over men and yawl, ropes, and everything, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.