de with the
dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the
authority of one in supreme command. Under the head of "2d high-water
trip--Jan., 1861--Alonzo Child," we have the story of a rising river
with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the
circumstance and uncertainty of change.

Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank
--could have gone up shore above General Taylor's--too much drift....

Night--didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads--8 ft. bank on main shore
Ozark Chute....

And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. It means little
enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the
swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in
place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers,
picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know
every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. All the
qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and
the high art of steering. "Steering is a very high, art," he says; "one
must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get
up the river fast."

He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the
Alonzo Child. Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the
dark, he recalled it. He said:

"There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a
perfectly wonderful creature. I do not know that Jack knew anymore
about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any
better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and I
think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness.

"I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it. I
had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill
any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when
Jack Leonard took the wheel. I had a chance one night to verify that
for myself. We were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest
nights I ever saw. Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that
she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying to locate
the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. It was
one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you
look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and