ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

as real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was
not heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice
engineer or ' striker J on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom
out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notori-
ously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this
eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing
generous about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage

to have a rusty bolt to
scrub while his boat
tarried at our town,
and he would sit on the
inside guard and scrub
it, where we could all
see him and envy him
and loathe him. And
whenever his boat was
laid up he would come
home and swell around
the town in his blackest
and greasiest clothes, so
that nobody could help
remembering that he
was a steamboatman;
and he used all sorts of
steamboat technicalities
in" his talk, as if he were
so used to them that he

*THE TOWN DBUNKAKD ASLEEP ONCE
MORE.'

forgot common people
could not understand
them. He would speak
of the e labboard' side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would
make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about ' St.
Looy' like an old citizen : he would refer casually to occasions when
he e was coming down Fourth Street,' or when he was * passing by the
Planter's House/ or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the
brakes of 'the old Big Missouri ;' and then he would go on and lie
about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that