THE BOYS' LIFE OF MARK TWAIN
time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before."
To heighten the illusion he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. The points along the river were nearly all new to him, everything had changed, 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,
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