COMPLETING MY EDUCATION. V*
of the deepest of them; when it rises a foot more you can run another
dozen ; the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on : so you
see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead moral
certainty, and never get them mixed ; for when you start through one
of those cracks, there's no backing out again, as there is in the big
river; you've got to go through, or stay there six months if you get
caught on a falling river. There are about fifty of these cracks which
you can't run at all except when the river is brim full and over the
banks.'
' This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'
* Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when
you start into one of those places you've got to go through. They are
too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the
shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere. And the
head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little, so that
the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not answer for
next.'
* Learn a new set, then, every year 1'
* Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up
through the middle of the river for ? '
The next few months showed me strange things. On the same
aay that we held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise
coming down the river. The whole vast face of the stream was
black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had
caved in and been washed away. It required the nicest steering to
pick one's way through this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when
crossing from point to point \ and at night the difficulty was mightily
increased ; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water,
would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head-on; no use
to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and one
wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up
a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very
uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we would hit one of
these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the centre, with a full head
of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent.
Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and
back the Mississippi up before it; we would have to do a little craw-