out to be a Hessian, and was allowed to walk home.

The hills and woods around Hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed
almost at will were never disappointing. There was the cave with its
marvels; there was Bear Creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had
learned to swim. It had cost him heavily to learn to swim. He had seen
two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged
ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a
slaveman--Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel. In the end he had conquered;
he could swim better than any boy in town of his age.

It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm was
permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world.
The river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous
steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the
sea! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out on it
in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough
to lift an oar out of the water. He learned to know all its moods and
phases. He felt its kinship. In some occult way he may have known it
as his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing
sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset
hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea.

His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. To be even
the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be
enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to
be a god.

"You can hardly imagine what it meant," he reflected once, "to a boy
in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and
down, and never to take a trip on them."

He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no
longer. One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal,
he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.
Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung
into midstream; he was really going at last. He crept from beneath the
boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. Then
it began to rain--a terrific downpour. He crept back under the boat, but
his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. So he was taken
down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. It was the town
of Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who too