The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0138/01385.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 12KB | 203 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01385}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter XXV}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{river
now
cairo
mumford
uncle
island
town
another
away
illinois}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter XXV

From Cairo To Hickman

     The scenery from St. Louis to Cairo - two hundred miles - is varied and
beautiful.  The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now, and
wore a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between.  Our
trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine, and
our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory despatch.

     We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a
penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on.  At Grand Tower, too, there
was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau.  The former town gets its name
from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the water on the
Missouri side of the river - a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork - and is
one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region.  For
nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's Bake-oven - so called,
perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else's bake-oven; and
the Devil's Tea-table - this latter a great smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with
diminishing wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty feet above the river,
beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table
to answer for anybody, Devil or Christian.  Away down the river we have the
Devil's Elbow and the Devil's Race-course, and lots of other property of his
which I cannot now call to mind.

     The town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in
old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new coat
of whitewash all over.  Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once
more.  "Uncle" Mumford, our second officer, said the place had been suffering
from high water and consequently was not looking its best now.  But he said it
was not strange that it didn't waste whitewash on itself, for more lime was
made there, and of a better quality, than anywhere in the West; and added, "On
a dairy-farm you never can get any milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it
on a sugar- plantation; and it is against sense to go to a lime-town to hunt
for whitewash." In my own experience I knew the first two items to be true:
and also that people who sell candy don't care for candy; therefore there was
plausibility in Uncle Mumford's final observation that "people who make lime
run more to religion than whitewash." Uncle Mumford said, further, that Grand
Tower was a great coaling center and a prospering place.

     Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome
appearance.  There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town
by the river.  Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness
as any similar institution in Missouri.  There was another college higher up
on an airy summit - a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered
and pinnacled - a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete.
Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri, and
contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of them on
a religious basis of one kind or another. He directed my attention to what he
called the "strong and pervasive religious look of the town," but I could not
see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same
slope and built of the same kind of bricks.  Partialities often make people
see more than really exists.

     Uncle Mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river.  He is a man of
practical sense and a level head; has observed; has had much experience of one
sort and another; has opinions; has, also, just a perceptible dash of poetry
in his composition, an easy gift of speech, a thick growl in his voice, and an
oath or two where he can get at them when the exigencies of his office require
a spiritual lift.  He is a mate of the blessed old-time kind; and goes gravely
d - ing around, when there is work to the fore, in a way to mellow the
ex-steamboatman's heart with sweet, soft longings for the vanished days that
shall come no more.  "Git up, there, - you!  Going to be all day?  Why d'n't
you say you was petrified in your hind legs, before you shipped?"

     He is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm; so they like
him, and stay with him.  He is still in the slouchy garb of the old generation
of mates; but next trip the Anchor Line will have him in uniform - a natty
blue naval uniform, with brass buttons, along with all the officers of the
line - and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what he
is now.

     Uniforms on the Mississippi!  It beats all the other changes put
together, for surprise.  Still, there is another surprise - that it was not
made fifty years ago.  It is so manifestly sensible that it might have been
thought of earlier, one would suppose.  During fifty years, out there, the
innocent passenger in need of help and information has been mistaking the mate
for the cook, and the captain for the barber - and being roughly entertained
for it, too.  But his troubles are ended now. And the greatly improved aspect
of the boat's staff is another advantage achieved by the dress-reform period.

     Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau.  They used to call it
"Steersman's Bend"; plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always; about the
only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed to take a boat
through, in low water.

     Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot of it,
were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone conspicuous
alteration.  Nor the Chain, either - in the nature of things; for it is a
chain of sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad
nights.  A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight; among
the rest my first friend, the Paul Jones; she knocked her bottom out, and went
down like a pot, so the historian told me - Uncle Mumford.  He said she had a
gray mare aboard, and a preacher.  To me, this sufficiently accounted for the
disaster; as it did, of course, to Mumford, who added:

     "But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter, and
call it superstition.  But you will always notice that they are people who
have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher.  I went down the river in
such company.  We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at Hanging Dog; we
grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted Beaver Dam Rock; we hit one
of the worst breaks in the 'Graveyard' behind Goose Island; we had a
roustabout killed in a fight; we burst a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a
flue; and went into Cairo with nine feet of water in the hold - may have been
more, may have been less.  I remember it as if it were yesterday.  The men
lost their heads with terror.  They painted the mare blue, in sight of town,
and threw the preacher overboard, or we should not have arrived at all.  The
preacher was fished out and saved.  He acknowledged, himself, that he had been
to blame.  I remember it all as if it were yesterday."

     That this combination - of preacher and gray mare - should breed calamity
seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by
so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason.  I myself
remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking
a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his purpose in spite of
all that could be said; and the same day - it may have been the next, and some
say it was, though I think it was the same day - he got drunk and fell down
the hatchway and was borne to his home a corpse.  This is literally true.

     No vestige of Hat Island