parties directly interested.
‘In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed.
‘Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain,
by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round
trips to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred
and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.’
Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots,
a chill fell there, and talking ceased. For this reason:
whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always
be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder
ones would be always ‘showing off’ before these poor fellows;
making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent
their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking
largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river;
always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could,
so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest
degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree.
And how these complacent baldheads WOULD swell, and brag, and lie,
and date back–ten, fifteen, twenty years,–and how they did enjoy
the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters!
And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings,
the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only
genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst.
Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant.
And imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation
of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin
to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature–
about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made,
a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set
his foot in a pilot-house!
Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene
in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him.
If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to
the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice;
and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one
a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before.
If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular
about little details; never spoke of ‘the State of Mississippi,’
for instance–no, he would say, ‘When the State of Mississippi was
where Arkansas now is,” and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri
in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind–
no, he would say, ‘When Louisiana was up the river farther,’ or ‘When
Missouri was on the Illinois side.’
The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot
down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river,
and sign them ‘MARK TWAIN,’ and give them to the ‘New Orleans Picayune.’
They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were
accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison.
But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point,
the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this
being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at
that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would
mention Island So-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some
such observation as ‘disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.’
In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for
the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the ‘Mark Twain’
paragraphs with unsparing mockery.
It so chanced that one of these paragraphs