ant side. In St. Louis, young
Clemens stopped with his sister, and often friends were there from
Hannibal. At both ends of the line he visited friendly boats, especially
the "Roe," where a grand welcome was always waiting. Once among the
guests of that boat a young girl named Laura so attracted him that he
forgot time and space until one of the "Roe" pilots, Zeb Leavenworth,
came flying aft, shouting:

"The 'Pennsylvania' is backing out!"

A hasty good-by, a wild flight across the decks of several boats, and a
leap across several feet of open water closed the episode. He wrote to
Laura, but there was no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from
her for nearly fifty years, when both were widowed and old. She had not
received his letter.

Occasionally there were stirring adventures aboard the "Pennsylvania."
In a letter written in March, 1858, the young pilot tells of an exciting
night search in the running ice for Hat Island soundings:

Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow with an oar, to keep her head out, and
I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would go well until
the yawl would bring us on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would
drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the
bottom of the boat. After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half
an inch thick on the oars . . . . The next day was colder still. I
was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal
steamboat came near running over us . . . . The "Maria Denning" was
aground at the head of the island; they hailed us; we ran alongside, and
they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had been out in the yawl from
four in the morning until half-past nine without being near a fire.
There was a thick coating of ice over men and yawl, ropes, and
everything, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.

He was at the right age to enjoy such adventures, and to feel a pride in
them. In the same letter he tells how he found on the "Pennsylvania" a
small clerkship for his brother Henry, who was now nearly twenty, a
handsome, gentle boy of whom Sam was lavishly fond and proud. The young
pilot was eager to have Henry with him--to see him started in life. How
little he dreamed what sorrow would come of his well-meant efforts in the
lad's behalf! Yet he always believed, later, that he had a warning, for
one night at the end of May, in St. Louis, he had a vivid dream, which
time would presently fulfil.

An inci