f he did not take up that writer's
relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too.

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are
of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting
circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to
clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an
insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. He picks
up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led
aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the honest intention of telling
you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. He would be 'so full of laugh'
that he could hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog's
breed and personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his
owner's family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had
occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and
obituary poetry provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect
that one of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter' of
such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter would
follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death, and
statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork
and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest
cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain
celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the
menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial Africa
was but a step; then of course the heathen savages would suggest
religion; and at the end of three or four hours' tedious jaw, the watch
would change, and Brown would go out of the pilot-house muttering
extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of
prayer as a means of grace. And the original first mention would be all
you had learned about that dog, after all this waiting and hungering.

A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he
must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and
a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest
trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he
cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one
cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains,
and a man must START with a good stock of that article or he wil