328 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

won't have any other. * They want a big drink; don't make any
difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money.
You give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents—
will he touch it ? No. Ain't size enough to it. But you put up
a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave in some red
stuff to make it beautiful—red's the main thing—and he wouldn't
put down that glass to go to a circus.' All the bars on this Anchor
Line are rented and owned by one firm. They furnish the liquors
from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers * on salary/
Good liquors ? Yes, on some of the boats, where there are the kind
of passengers that want it and can pay for ifc. On the other boats ?
No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it. ' Brandy 1
Yes, I've got brandy, plenty of it; but you don't want any of it
unless you've made your will.' It isn't as it used to be in the old
times. Then everybody travelled by steamboat, everybody drank,
and everybody treated everybody else. * Now most everybody goes
. by railroad, and the rest don't drink.' In the old times the bar-
keeper owned the bar himself, * and was gay and smarty and talky
and all jewelled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat;
used to make $2,000 on a trip. A father who left his son a steam-
boat bar, left Tn'm a fortune. Now he leaves him board and lodging;
yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will do. Yes, indeedy, times
are changed. Why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on
the Upper Mississippi, they don't have any bar at all! Sounds like
poetry, but it's the petrified truth.'