responsibilities, and dangers of steamboat life as it really was, into a Midsummer Night's Dream of care-free, exhilarating experiences, and glorified achievement.

Of the river itself it may be said, that like the wild tribes which peopled its banks sixty years ago, civilization has been its undoing. The primeval forests which spread for hundreds of miles on either side, then caught and held the melting snows and falling rains of spring within spongy mosses which carpeted the earth; slowly, throughout the summer, were distilled the waters from myriad springs, and these, filling brooks and smaller rivers, feeders of the Great River, maintained a mighty volume of water the season through. Upon the disappearance of the forests, the melting snows and early rains having no holding grounds, are carried quickly to the river, which as quickly rises to an abnormal stage in the early part of the season, to be followed by a dearth which later reduces the Mississippi to the dimensions of a second-rate stream, whereon navigation is impossible for great steamers, and arduous, disheartening and unprofitable for boats of any class.

To most men of our day, the life of those who manned the steamers of that once mighty fleet is legendary, almost mythical. Its story is unwritten. To the few participants who yet remain, it is but a memory. The boats themselves have disappeared, leaving no token. The masters and the mates, the pilots and the clerks, the engineers and the men of humbler station have likewise gone. Of the thousands who contributed to give life and direction to the vessels themselves, a meager score of short biographies is all that history vouchsafes.

The aim of the present volume is to tell something of these men, and of the boats that they made sentient by their knowledge and power; to relate something of the incidents of river life as seen by a boy during eight years of residence by the riverside, or in active service on the river itself. While it may not literally be claimed, "All of which I saw," it is with satisfaction, not unmixed with pride, that the writer can truthfully assert, "A part of which I was."

G. B. M.

The several quotations from "Mark Twain" which herein appear are from Life on the Mississippi (copyright, 1903), by Samuel L. Clemens, permission for the use of which is kindly granted for the present purpose by the publishers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, New York.

Descent from an ancestry whose members built and sailed ships from Salem, Newburyport, and Nantucket two hundred years ago, and even down to the early days of the nineteenth century, ought to give an hereditary bias toward a sailor's life, on waters either salt or fresh. A score-and-a-half of men of my name have "died with their boots on" at sea, from the port of Nantucket alone. They went for whales, and the whales got them. Perhaps their fate should have discouraged the sea-going instinct, but perversely it had the opposite effect. A hundred men are lost out of Gloucester every year, yet their boys are on the "Banks" before they are fairly weaned.

I was born at Niles, Michigan, on the historic St. Joseph River, which in those days was of considerable importance commercially. Scores of keel boats plied between South Bend and the mouth of the river at St. Joseph, on Lake Michigan. Keel boats drifted down the river, and after unloading were towed back by little steamboats, about eighty feet long by eighteen feet beam. These were propelled by side wheels attached to a single shaft, driven by a horizontal engine of indifferent power. These steamers towed four "keels" upstream at the rate of five or six miles an hour. The former had no upper cabin answering to the "boiler deck" of the Mississippi River boats—only a roof covering the main deck, with the passenger cabin aft, and the quarters of the crew forward of the boiler and engine.

It was, I suppose, a quarter of a mile from my birthplace to the river bank where we boys of the neighborhood went to see the steamboats pass. In the opposite direction, around a sharp bend and across the low-lying, alluvial land, which comprised the home farm, the river was discernible a mile away. When a boat was seen coming up river, the alarm was given, and we little shavers of the neighborhood raced for the nearest point of view, a high bank of blue clay, rising probably seventy-five feet above the river. We used to think it was as many hundreds of feet; and what I now know as the quarter mile, then stretched away into interminable distances as it was measured by the stubby yet sturdy little legs of six-year-old runners. On the edge of this blue-clay bank, I received my first impressions in river piloting.

My teacher in these matters was a man whom I greatly envied. Kimball Lyon lived in a house three times as large as that in which I was born. His father had left a big farm and a bank account of fabulous dimensions. We knew it was large, because "Kim" never worked as other young men of twenty-five or thirty years did in those days. His mother always kept a "hired man", while Kim toiled not; but he spun.

It was not his riches, however, nor his immunity from toil, that common lot of other men, which excited the envy of the six-year-olds. He could, and did, play on the accordion. Lying on his back in the shade and resting one corner of his instrument upon his bosom, with irresistible power and pathos he sang and played

It appealed to all the natural impulses of our being, and the dormant instincts inherited from generations of whale-hunting ancestors were aroused by the power of music, reinforced by the suggestive words of the song itself; and then and there we vowed that when we were men like Kimball Lyon, we too would own and play upon accordions, and do all else that he had done; for marvelous tales he told, of his experiences in great storms at sea and of deeds of aquatic prowess. We learned in after years that "Kim" once sailed from St. Joseph to Chicago in a sawed-off lumber hooker, when the wind was west nor'west, down the lake, and that he did actually lie on the deck, but not on his back, and that it was not music which he emitted, and that the sailors railed at him, and that he came back from Chicago by stage coach to Niles. But we didn't know this when he was awakening our viking instincts, as we lay on the banks of the old St. Joe in the sunny summer days of long ago.

"Kim" Lyon knew all about steamboats, as well as about deep sea ships, and when we asked questions he could answer out of the fullness of his knowledge. We wondered what made the wheels go 'round, and he told us. I have forgotten what made them go 'round, but my recollection is that it was a peculiar mechanical process of which I have never seen the like in any other service on river, lake or ocean. His answer to the query as to "what is the man in the little house on top of the boat doing?" I have never forgotten, as it afterward came more in my line of business. The man was twisting the wheel as all pilots before and since that time twist it, a spoke or two to port, a half dozen to starboard, hard up and hard down, there being a shallow piece of river just there, beset with big boulders and reefs of gravel, through which he was cautiously worming his boat and its kite-tail of keels.

"That man," said Kimball, "is drawing water from a well in the bottom of the boat and emptying it into the boiler, just as your father draws water from his well with a rope, a bucket and a crank. If he should stop for a minute the boiler would