been since 1815.
‘I. Sellers.’]>
became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued
it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent
of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a ‘cub’ at the time.
I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into
print in the ‘New Orleans True Delta.’ It was a great pity; for it did
nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man’s heart.
There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain.
It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful.
I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable
with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time
pilloried in print.
Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth.
When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words.
It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as
Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it.
It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater
distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people;
but he didn’t sit up nights to hate anybody but me.
He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again
signed ‘Mark Twain’ to anything. At the time that the telegraph
brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast.
I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre;
so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one,
and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands–
a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its
company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I
have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.
The captain had an honorable pride in his profession
and an abiding love for it. He ordered his monument
before he died, and kept it near him until he did die.
It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine cemetery, St. Louis.
It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel;
and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man
who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder,
if duty required it.
The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached
New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent
city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights.
It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful.
Chapter 51
Reminiscences
WE left for St. Louis in the ‘City of Baton Rouge,’ on a delightfully
hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished.
I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen,
but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I
got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen
of the craft.
I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and
‘straightened up’ for the start–the boat pausing for a ‘good ready,’
in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys
equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum,
and presently were fairly under way and booming along.
It was all as natural and familiar–and so were the shoreward sights–
as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a ‘cub,’
and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did.
Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot-house. Presently the cub
closed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous,
for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships.
I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could date
back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on,