where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same
height--all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put
it--and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the
real shape of the river. Some of the boats had what they call a 'night
hawk' on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the
right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the
right position and was generally pretty useless.

"I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get
through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked
in. He was a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard.
I was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one
way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing
it like a squirrel.

"'Sam,' he said, 'let me take the wheel. Maybe I have been over this
place since you have.'

"I didn't argue the question. Jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn
one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as
quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight
in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one
could possibly hit. I never saw anything so beautiful. He stayed my
watch out for me, and I hope I was decently grateful. I have never
forgotten it."

The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but
there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or
when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of
speculative dreams. He was always speculating; the planets and the
remote suns were always a marvel to him. A love of astronomy--the
romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities--began with
those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. For a time
a great comet blazed in the heavens, a "wonderful sheaf of light"
that glorified his lonely watch. Night after night he watched it as
it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet
literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. He speculated of
many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation,
the ways of Providence and Destiny. It was a fruitful time for such
meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would
find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of
phrase.

Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those sti