BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is,make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters,some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting.

First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantlycultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection.

Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory.

He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so;he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences.

With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times,if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,'

instead of the vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily realizewhat a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelvehundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness.

If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel upand down it, conning its features patiently until you know everyhouse and window and door and lamp-post and big and little signby heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantlyname the one you are abreast of when you are set down at randomin that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will thenhave a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of apilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.

And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing,the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones,and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places,you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in orderto keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if youwill take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIRPLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positionsaccurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changeswithout making any mistakes, you will understand what is requiredof a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.

I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thingin the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart,and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward,or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both waysand never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant massof knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot'smassed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facilityin the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately,and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it.

Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not.

And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work;how placidly effortless is its way; how UNCONSCIOUSLY it lays upits vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses ormislays a single valuable package of them all! Take an instance.

Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!

half twain!' until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock;let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doinghis share of the talking, and no longer consciously listeningto the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of halftwains let a single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis,and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before:

two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precisionthe boat's position in the river when that quarter twainwas uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks,and side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to takethe boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself!

The cry of 'quarter twain' did not really take his mind from his talk,but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings,noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for futurereference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter.

If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friendat your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A,for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R,thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis,you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward,that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects youwere passing at the moment it was done. But you could if yourmemory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sortof thing mechanically.

Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and pilotingwill develop it into a very colossus of capability.

But ONLY IN THE MATTERS IT IS DAILY DRILLED IN.

A time would come when the man's faculties could not helpnoticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could nothelp holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if youasked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast,it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you willdevote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief,Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand milesof that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing.

When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night,his education was so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license;a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting dayand night--and he ranked A 1, too.

Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose featsof memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was bornin him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name.

Instantly Mr. Brown would break in--'Oh, I knew HIM. Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with alittle scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter underthe flesh. He was only in the Southern trade six months.

That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him.

There was five feet in the upper river then; the "Henry Blake"grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half;the "George Elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreckof the "Sunflower"----'

'Why, the "Sunflower" didn't sink until----'

'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December;Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk;and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these thingsa week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the "Sunflower."Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year,and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after3rd of March,--erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys,--they wereAlleghany River men,--but people who knew them told me all these things.

And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same,and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she was from New England--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood.

She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married.'

And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go.

He could NOT forget any thing. It was simply impossible.

The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head,after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events.

His was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was universal.

If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received sevenyears before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screedfrom memory. And then without observing that he was departingfrom the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurlin a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter;and you were lucky indeed if 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 occurrencesare of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interestingcircumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is boundto clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himselfan 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 honestintention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.

He would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then hismemory would start with the dog's breed ............