their triumph was not very
long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that
its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give
information about the channel to any 'outsider.' By this time about
half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had
none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it
came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could
play equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town
from one end of the river to the other, there was a 'wharf-boat' to land
at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for
transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of
these wharf-boats the association's officers placed a strong box
fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but
one--the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a
sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had
been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every
association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or
rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked
for river information by a stranger--for the success of the St. Louis
and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in
a dozen neighboring steamboat trades--was the association man's sign and
diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing
a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his
question was politely ignored. From the association's secretary each
member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like
a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a bill-head
worded something like this--

STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC.

JOHN SMITH MASTER

PILOTS, JOHN JONES AND THOMAS BROWN.

+ ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- +

| CROSSINGS. | SOUNDINGS. | MARKS. | REMARKS. |

+ ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- +

These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and
deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the
first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be
entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus--

'St. L