Chapter 28 - Page 2

new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you,
on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you;
so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified
darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out
your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye,
and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and George
Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass;
they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole.
With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with considerable security,
and with a confidence unknown in the old days.

With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of
daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed,
and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good
stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage,
and is hardly more than three times as romantic.

And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor
Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger
wages of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there.
They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his
watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore.
We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed now,
as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are
lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too.
Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers.
The Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has
taken away its state and dignity.

Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the
exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings,
and also a lot of other lights on the Point and along its shore;
these latter glinting from the fleet of the United States
River Commission, and from a village which the officials have built
on the land for offices and for the employes of the service.
The military engineers of the Commission have taken upon
their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again--
a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.
They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current;
and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make
it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi,
they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back,
with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark
with the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones;
and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with