to filter into Mr. Bixby’s system, and then I judge it filled
him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment–
and not much of a one either. He said,
‘Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more
different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before.
What did you suppose he wanted to know for?’
I said I thought it might be a convenience to him.
‘Convenience D-nation! Didn’t I tell you that a man’s got to know the river
in the night the same as he’d know his own front hall?’
‘Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it IS the front hall;
but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me
which hall it is; how am I to know?’
‘Well you’ve GOT to, on the river!’
‘All right. Then I’m glad I never said anything to Mr. W—-‘
‘I should say so. Why, he’d have slammed you through the window and utterly
ruined a hundred dollars’ worth of window-sash and stuff.’
I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made
me unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody
who had the name of being careless, and injuring things.
I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding
and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on,
that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that
projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously
photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to
succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating
thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there
had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape,
I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest,
and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it!
No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up
my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful
as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics.
Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had
borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby.
He said–
‘That’s the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes
didn’t change every three seconds they wouldn’t be of any use.
Take this place where we are now, for instance.
As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom
right along the way I’m going; but the moment it splits at
the top and forms a V, I know I’ve got to scratch to starboard
in a hurry, or I’ll bang this boat’s brains out against a rock;
and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind
the other, I’ve got to waltz to larboard again, or I’ll have
a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out
of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand.
If that hill didn’t change its shape on bad nights there
would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside
of a year.’
It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river
in all the different ways that could be thought of,–upside down,
wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and ‘thortships,’–and then
know what to do on gray nights when it hadn’t any shape at all.
So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this
knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.
Mr. Bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it to the rear again.
He opened on me after this fashion–
‘How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall,
trip before last?’