Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he "ran away,"
vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory.
This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely
died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head
when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so
conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to
Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the
gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was
to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four
marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that
followed them.

In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then
a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records
incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others.
He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for
it was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he
was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of
piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he
had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was
already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and
had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his
work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well
knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the
river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the
old "permanent ambition" of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the
far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint.

Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still
living (1910) and at the wheel,--[The writer of this memoir interviewed
Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was
looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a
slow, pleasant voice say:

"Good morning."

Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man.

"Good morning, sir," he said, briskly, without looking around.

As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This
one presently came up and stood a little behind him.

"How would you like a young man to learn the river?" he said.

The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender,
loose-limbed