IS4 LIFE 0^ THE MISSISSIPPI

CHAPTER XVIII.
I TAKE A FEW EXTRA LESSONS.
DURING the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, I served
under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboat-
men and many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always con-
venient for Mr. BLxby to have me with him, and in such cases he
sent me with somebody else, I am to this day profiting somewhat
by that experience; for in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally
and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human
nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. The
fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore-employment
requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of an
education. When I say I am still profiting by this thing, I do not
mean that it has constituted me a judge of men—no, it has not done
that; for judges of men are born, not made. My profit is various in
kind and degree; but the feature of it which I value most is the zest
which that early experience has given to my later reading. When I
find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take
a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known
him before—met him on the river.
The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of
that vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer * Pennsylvania*—
the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good
and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-
shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-hunting,
mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch
with dread at my heart. No matter how good a time I might have
been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my