138

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

personage in the old stea.mboating days. He was treated with
marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the
officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly com-
municated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the
only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree,
embarrassment in the presence of travelling foreign princes. But
then, people in one's own grade of life are not usually embarrassing
objects.

* TEBATBD WITH MAEKED DEFERENCE.'
By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of
commands. It e gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak
shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an
order.
In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to
New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-
five days, on an average. Seven or eight pf these days the boat
spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul
on. board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing