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 it. On the other boats? No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen
to drink it. 'Brandy? 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 traveled 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 barkeeper
owned the bar himself, 'and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled
up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a
trip. A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him 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.'

Chapter 34 Tough Yarns

STACK ISLAND. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence,
Louisiana--which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come
to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable
gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the
place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling--also with truth.

A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region
which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a
steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas
City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower
packet. He was an austere man, and had the reputation of being
singularly unworldly, for a river man. Among other things, he said that
Arkansas had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations
concerning the mosquitoes here. One may smile, said he, and turn the
matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the
effects produ