The bank is, in appearance, contemporary with the town. The fittings are of the period of the Civil War--walnut, as I recall them. And there are red glass signs over the little window grilles bearing the legends "Cashier" and "President." In the back room we met the president, Mr. John O. Roberts, a gentleman over eighty years of age, who can sit back, with his feet upon his desk, smoke cigars, and, from a cloud of smoke, exude the most delightful stories of old days on the Mississippi. For Mr. Roberts was clerk on river boats more than sixty years ago, in the golden days of the great stream. There, too, we had the good fortune to meet Professor M. S. Goodman, who was born in Missouri in 1837, and founded the Clarksville High School in 1865. The professor has written the history of Pike County--but that is a big story all by itself. In the old days Pike County embraced many of the other present counties, and, running all the way from the Mississippi to the Missouri River, was as large as a good-sized State. Pike has colonized more Western country than any other county in Missouri; or, as Professor Goodman put it, "The west used to be full of Pike County men who had pushed out there with their guns and bottles." "Yes," added Mr. Roberts in his dry, crackling tone, "and wherever they went they always wanted office." I asked Mr. Roberts about the famous poker games on the river boats. "I antedate poker," he said. "The old river card game was called 'Brag.' It was out of brag that the game of poker developed. A steward on one of the boats once told me that he and the other boys had picked up more than a hundred dollars from the floor of a room in which Henry Clay and some friends had been playing brag." Golden days indeed!--and for every one. The steamboat companies made fabulous returns on their investments. [Illustration: Mr. Roberts is a wonder--nothing less. There's a book in him, and I hope that somebody will write it, for I should like to read that book] "In '54 and '55," said Mr. Roberts, "I worked for the St. Louis & Keokuk Packet Company, a line owning three boats, which weren't worth over $75,000. That company cleaned up as much as $150,000 clear profit in one season. And, of course, a season wasn't an entire year, either. It would open about March first and end in December or, in a mild winter, January. "But I tell you we used to drive those boats. We'd shoot up to the docks and land our passengers and mail and freight without so much as tying up or even stopping. We'd just scrape along the dock and then be off again.