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around so—never lie still five minutes at a time. You can tell a wind-
reef, straight off, bv the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a
sand-reef—that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth
anything. Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and
when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when you get there,
the devils have swapped around so, meantime. Of course there were
some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as
they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for
it; it wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it.
Let me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire
BeD, and Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and
Billy Gordon, and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood

ALLIGATOR PILOTS.
—all A 1 alligator pilots. They could tell alligator water as far as
another Christian could tell whiskey. Bead it ?—Ah, couldn't they,
though ! I only wish I had as many dollars as they could read alli-
gator water a mile and a half off. Yes, and it paid them to do it, too.
A good alligator pilot could always get fifteen hundred dollars a
month, lights, other people had to lay up for alligators, but those
fellows never laid up for alligators ; they never laid up for anything
but fog. They could smell the best alligator water—so it was said;
I don't know whether it was so or not, and I think a body's got his
hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself, without
going around backing up other people's say-so's, though there's a
plenty that ain't backward about doing it, as long as they can. roust