the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch
of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid
cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen
minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time
when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in
one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape
of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your
pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark
night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be
straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd RUN them for
straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right
into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that
in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes
way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's
one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any
particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the
oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT
change the shape of the river in different ways. You see--'

'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the
river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If
I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me
stoop-shouldered.'

'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such
absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR
HEAD, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'

'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it.
Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'

Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch, and
he said--

'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,
you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old
sycamore-snag, now.{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it
can do no harm to explain that 'inside' means between the snag and the
shore.--M.T.]}

So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty
apparent to me