the flesh. He was only in the Southern trade six months.
That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him.
There was five feet in the upper river then; the “Henry Blake”
grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half;
the “George Elliott” unshipped her rudder on the wreck
of the “Sunflower”—-‘
‘Why, the “Sunflower” didn’t sink until—-‘
‘I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December;
Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk;
and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things
a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the “Sunflower.”
Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year,
and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after
3rd of March,–erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys,–they were
Alleghany River men,–but people who knew them told me all these things.
And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same,
and his first wife’s name was Jane Shook–she was from New England–
and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood.
She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married.’
And so on, by the hour, the man’s tongue would go.
He could NOT forget any thing. It was simply impossible.
The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head,
after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events.
His was not simply a pilot’s memory; its grasp was universal.
If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven
years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed
from memory. And then without observing that he was departing
from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl
in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter;
and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer’s relatives,
one by one, and give you their biographies, too.
Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences
are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting
circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound
to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself
an insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject.
He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way,
and so is led aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the honest
intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.
He would be ‘so full of laugh’ that he could hardly begin; then his
memory would start with the dog’s breed and personal appearance;
drift into a history of his owner; of his owner’s family,
with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it,
together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry
provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that one
of these events occurred during the celebrated ‘hard winter’
of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter
would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death,
and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to.
Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would
suggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus
and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from
the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant
to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathen
savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours’
tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go out
of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard
years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace.
And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,
after all this waiting and hungering.
A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities