is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.[25] It was the romance of this river, the vastness and the mystery of it, the great unknown world which lay beyond those "points" where all things disappeared, that made of the boy a restless soul, a dreamer and an idealist--that made of him indeed the Mark Twain of the later years. His books nowhere rise into the pure serene of literature unless touched at some point by this magic stream that flowed so marvelously through his boyhood. The two discoverers of the Mississippi were De Soto and Mark Twain. The first crisis in the boy's life came in his twelfth year, when the death of his father sent him as an apprentice to a country newspaper office, that most practical and most exacting of all training schools for youth. Two years on the Missouri _Courier_, four years on the Hannibal _Journal_, then the restlessness of his clan sent him wandering into the East even as it had sent Artemus Ward and Nasby into the West. For fifteen months he served as compositor in New York City and Philadelphia, then a great homesickness for the river came upon him. From boyhood it had been his dream to be the pilot of a Mississippi steamboat; all other professions seemed flat and lifeless compared with that satisfying and boundless field of action; and it is not strange that in April, 1857, we find him installed as Horace Bixby's "cub" at the beginning of a new career. During the next four years he gave himself heart and soul to the almost superhuman task of committing to memory every sandbar and point and landmark in twelve hundred miles of a shifting, treacherous river. The difficulties he has explained fully in his book. It was a college course of four years, and no man ever had a better one. To quote his own words: In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river.[26] It taught him far more than this. The pilot of a great Mississippi boat was a man with peculiar responsibilities. The lives of the passengers and the safety of the cargo were absolutely in his hands. His authority was above even the captain's. Only picked men of courage and judgment with a self-reliance that never wavered in any crisis were fit material for pilots. To quote Horace Bixby, the most noted of them all: