84 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
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 down-stream
that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties
to Mr. Bixby. He said—
1 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 IT1
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-afb, 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, watei did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-
the-Wall, trip before last 1'
I considered this an outrage. I said—
* Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through that
tangled place for three quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do yon
reckon I can remember such a mess as that ?'
* My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember
the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the
shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between
St. Louis and New Orleans; and yon mustn't get the shoal soundings