The things we do!

There never was so
wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so
absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal."
[Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 82-83.]
When I was entering the English Channel on my way to Havre, the captain
showed me what varied courses must be taken at different hours and
different days to gain full advantage of tide and current and yet avoid
all danger. But, as this Mississippi River pilot has observed, it is now a
comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run these buoyed and lighted
ship channels; it was then quite another matter to pilot a steamboat in
the Mississippi or Missouri, "whose alluvial banks cave and change
constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand-
bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking,
and whose obstructions" had fifty years ago to be "confronted in all
nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single
buoy." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p.


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