I answered,New England.'Oh,a Yank!'said he;and went chatting straight along,without waiting for assent or denial.
He immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell me the names of her different parts,and teach me their uses.
Before I could enter protest or excuse,he was already rattling glibly away at his benevolent work;and when Iperceived that he was misnaming the things,and inhospitably amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from a far country,I held my peace,and let him have his way.
He gave me a world of misinformation;and the further he went,the wider his imagination expanded,and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of deceit.Sometimes,after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me,he was so 'full of laugh'that he had to step aside for a minute,upon one pretext or another,to keep me from suspecting.
I staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished.
Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn'me all about a steamboat,and had done it;but that if he had overlooked anything,just ask him and he would supply the lack.
'Anything about this boat that you don't know the name of or the purpose of,you come to me and I'll tell you.'
I said I would,and took my departure;disappeared,and approached him from another quarter,whence he could not see me.
There he sat,all alone,doubling himself up and writhing this way and that,in the throes of unappeasable laughter.
He must have made himself sick;for he was not publicly visible afterward for several days.Meantime,the episode dropped out of my mind.
The thing that reminded me of it now,when I was alone at the wheel,was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door,with the knob in his hand,silently and severely inspecting me.
I don't know when I have seen anybody look so injured as he did.
He did not say anything--simply stood there and looked;reproachfully looked and pondered.Finally he shut the door,and started away;halted on the texas a minute;came slowly back and stood in the door again,with that grieved look in his face;gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke,then said--'You let me learn you all about a steamboat,didn't you?'
'Yes,'I confessed.
'Yes,you did--DIDN'T you?'
'Yes.'
'You are the feller that--that----'
Language failed.Pause--impotent struggle for further words--then he gave it up,choked out a deep,strong oath,and departed for good.
Afterward I saw him several times below during the trip;but he was cold--would not look at me.Idiot,if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless practical joke upon me,in the beginning,I would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction,and saved him from committing that wanton and silly impoliteness.
I had myself called with the four o'clock watch,mornings,for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi.
They are enchanting.First,there is the eloquence of silence;for a deep hush broods everywhere.Next,there is the haunting sense of loneliness,isolation,remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world.The dawn creeps in stealthily;the solid walls of black forest soften to gray,and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves;the water is glass-smooth,gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist,there is not the faintest breath of wind,nor stir of leaf;the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying.
Then a bird pipes up,another follows,and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music.You see none of the birds;you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself.When the light has become a little stronger,you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable.
You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by;you see it paling shade by shade in front of you;upon the next projecting cape,a mile off or more,the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring;the cape beyond that one has almost lost color,and the furthest one,miles away under the horizon,sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor,and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it.And all this stretch of river is a mirror,and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it.