Chapter 8 - Page 2

and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.
Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different
shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night.
All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too;
and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better.
You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid,
straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is
a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you.
Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one
of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any
particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head
of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds
of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.
You see----'

'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river
according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried
to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.'

'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such
absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD,
and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'

'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it.
Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'

Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch,
and he said--

'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all
that country clear away up above he Old Hen and Chickens.
The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing
like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40.
You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain
that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.--M.T.]>

So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape.
My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent
to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than
any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn
it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.

That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river
custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed.
While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar,
his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this--

'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point;
had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet.
'Mark