but during
high-water this mattered little. He was a pilot again--a young fellow in
his twenties, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his
fortunes in the stars. The river had lost none of its charm for him. To
Bixby he wrote:

"I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever been in my life.
How do you run Plum Point?"

He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was a captain now, on the splendid
new Anchor Line steamer "City of Baton Rouge," one of the last of the
fine river boats. Clemens made the return trip to St. Louis with Bixby
on the "Baton Rouge"--almost exactly twenty-five years from their first
trip together. To Bixby it seemed wonderfully like those old days back
in the fifties.

"Sam was making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did,"
said Bixby, long after, to the writer of this history.

Mark Twain decided to see the river above St. Louis. He went to Hannibal
to spend a few days with old friends. "Delightful days," he wrote home,
"loitering around all day long, and talking with grayheads who were boys
and girls with me thirty or forty years ago." He took boat for St. Paul
and saw the upper river, which he had never seen before. He thought the
scenery beautiful, but he found a sadness everywhere because of the decay
of the river trade. In a note-book entry he said: "The romance of
boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god."

He worked at the Mississippi book that summer at the farm, but did not
get on very well, and it was not until the following year (1883) that it
came from the press. Osgood published it, and Charles L. Webster, who
had married Mark Twain's niece, Annie (daughter of his sister Pamela),
looked after the agency sales. Mark Twain, in fact, was preparing to
become his own publisher, and this was the beginning. Webster was a man
of ability, and the book sold well.

"Life on the Mississippi" is one of Mark Twain's best books--one of those
which will live longest. The first twenty chapters are not excelled in
quality anywhere in his writings. The remainder of the book has an
interest of its own, but it lacks the charm of those memories of his
youth--the mellow light of other days which enhances all of his better
work.

XLIV.

A READING-TOUR WITH CABLE

Every little while Mark Twain had a fever of play-writing, and it was
about this time that he collaborated with W. D. Howells on a second
Colonel Sellers play. It was a