536 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
and yet there are reasons why it might not really be. When one
makes Bis first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which mnltitu-
dinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such
sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they
take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory.
By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and
stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it
all But if he wait 1 If he make ten voyages in succession—what
then? Why, the thing has lost colour, snap, surprise; and has
become commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that
would quicken a landsman's pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants
—a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way,
those people told it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their
tongues eloquent for ever perhaps ; but they had six weeks of it, and
that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled
out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace.
After that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting
in their talks about it was gone. What the man said was to thig
effect:—
* It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week—to us,
anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sun-
days, and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the
night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At
first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards.
The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along.
When she was all safe hi the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks after-
wards, when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell*
shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a
piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of
her head. Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along
again! Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we
coold tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under
shelter if it was a light shower. TJs men would loaf around and talk; and a
man would say,* There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from
tbesaand of it, and go on talking—if there wasn't any danger from it. If a
shell -was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;—un-
comfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we went on