is mainly fiction, but hardly the
following:

Presently he turned to me and said: "What's the name of the first
point above New Orleans?"

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I
didn't know.

"Don't know!"

His manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment.
But I had to say just what I had said before.

"Well, you're a smart one," said Mr. Bixby. "What's the name of the
next point?"

Once more I didn't know.

"Well, this beats anything! Tell me the name of any point or place
I told you."

I studied awhile and decided that I couldn't.

"Look here! What do you start from, above Twelve Mile Point, to
cross over?"

"I--I--don't know."

"'You--you don't know,"' mimicking my drawling manner of speech.
"What do you know?"

"I--I--Nothing, for certain."

Bixby was a small, nervous man, hot and quick-firing. He went off
now, and said a number of severe things. Then:

"Look here, what do you suppose I told you the names of those points
for?"

I tremblingly considered a moment--then the devil of temptation
provoked me to say: "Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought."

This was a red flag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was
crossing the river at the time) that I judged it made him blind,
because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course
the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man
so grateful as Mr. Bixby was, because he was brimful, and here were
subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his
head out, and such an irruption followed as I had never heard before
. . . . When he closed the window he was empty. Presently he
said to me, in the gentlest way:

"My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I
tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to
be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have
to know it just like A-B-C."

The little memorandum-book which Sam Clemens bought, probably at the next
daylight landing, still exists--the same that he says "fairly bristled
with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.";
but it made his heart ache to think he had only half the river set down,
for, as the watches were four hours off and four hours on, there were the
long gaps where he had slept.

It is not easy to m