I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed
out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled
with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.
Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help
lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy
the envy of the country boys on the bank. If they did not seem
to discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their attention,
or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me.
And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave other
signs of being mightily bored with traveling.
I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind
and the sun could strike me, because I wanted to get
the bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler.
Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joy
which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that
the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck.
I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now.
We reached Louisville in time–at least the neighborhood of it.
We stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river,
and lay there four days. I was now beginning to feel a strong
sense of being a part of the boat’s family, a sort of infant
son to the captain and younger brother to the officers.
There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur,
or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for
those people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatman
scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman.
I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice
from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an
opportunity to do him a service to that end. It came at last.
The riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on
the forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in the way–
or mostly skipping out of it–till the mate suddenly roared
a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar.
I sprang to his side and said: ‘Tell me where it is–
I’ll fetch it!’
If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor
of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was.
He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me.
It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again.
Then he said impressively: ‘Well, if this don’t beat hell!’
and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confronted
with a problem too abstruse for solution.
I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day.
I did not go to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else
had finished. I did not feel so much like a member of the boat’s
family now as before. However, my spirits returned, in installments,
as we pursued our way down the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so,
because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him.
He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over;
he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,–
one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it;
and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he was getting
out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear.
He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world
feel it, too. When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged
it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal
of profanity thundering after it. I could not help contrasting
the way in which the average landsman would give an order,
with the mate’s way of doing it. If the landsman should wish
the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say: