PERPLJBXIN& LESSONS. 78
fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to he within fifty
feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you
know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when
you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river
is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a
starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty
A\TC\ ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know
better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid,
straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve
there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's
your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly,
drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a
shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that
ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape
of the river in different ways. You see------'
* Oh, don't say any more, please ! Have I got to learn the shape
of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different
ways ? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make
me stoop-shouldered.1
* No ! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it
with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape
that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'
' Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend
on it ? "Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around ?'
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W------came in to take the
watch, and he said—
' Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks
are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything.
Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside
the old sycamore-snag, now.'1
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore
changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things
seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a
man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to
1 It may not be necessary, bat still it can do no harm to explain that
1 inside * means between the snag and the shore.—M. T.