during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself,
and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within
a band-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had
done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot,
the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans.
It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated–
with somebody else as victim.
We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half–
much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water.
The next morning I came on with the four o’clock watch, and saw Ritchie
successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his
guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself.
This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart.
By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection
of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred
yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself.
The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog,
were very pretty things to see.
We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg,
and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had
an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me.
This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank
when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me.
The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside
of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession,
thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that,
and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according
to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced
after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats.
No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural–all tints
were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead.
The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching
ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark,
rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched.
The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion
with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily
sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning
was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted
the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension
shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession.
The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals
broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench
off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space;
the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging,
and I went down in the hold to see what time it was.
People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms;
but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not
the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley.
I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course,
and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don’t wish to.
On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a
mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years.
Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years
of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead,
where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through
in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken,
in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this
ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now.
But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find
out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet,
or some other little convenience, here and there, which has
got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation