USCLE MUMFQMIl   UNLOADS.	263
,vay or *ied up to the shore. We, that were once the aristocrats of
the river, can't go to bed now, as we used to do, and sleep while a
hundred tons of freight are lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the
pilot-house; and keep awake, too. Verily we are being treated like
a parcel of mates and engineers. The Government has taken away
the romance of our calling; the Company has taken away its state
and dignity.
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the ex-
ception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also
a lot of other lights on the Point and along its shore ; these latter
glinting from the fleet of the United States River Commission, and
from a village which the officials have built on the land for offices and
DAYLIGHT.
for the employes of the service. The military engineers of the Com-
mission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mis-
sissippi over again—a job transcended in size by only the original
job of creating it. They are building wing-dams here and there, to
deflect the current; and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and
other dikes to make it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along
the Mississippi, they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back,
with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark with
the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones; and in many
places they have protected the wasting shores with rows of piles.
One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to
himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the Tninffi of the