The aristocrat of the Mississippi River steamboat was the pilot. To him all men deferred. So far as the river service furnished a parallel to the autocratic authority of the sea-going captain or master, he was it. All matters pertaining to the navigation of the boat were in his domain, and right zealously he guarded his authority and his dignity. The captain might determine such trivial matters as hiring or discharging men, buying fuel, or contracting for freight; the clerk might lord it over the passengers, and the mate domineer over the black roustabouts; but the pilot moved along in a sort of isolated grandeur, the true monarch of all he surveyed. If, in his judgment the course of wisdom was to tie up to an old sycamore tree on the bank and remain motionless all night, the boat tied up. The grumblings of passengers and the disapproval of the captain availed naught, nor did the captain often venture upon either criticism or suggestion to the lordly pilot, who was prone to resent such invasion of his dignity in ways that made trouble. Indeed, during the flush times on the Mississippi, the pilots were a body of men possessing painfully acquired knowledge and skill, and so organized as to protect all the privileges which their attainments should win for them. The ability to "run" the great river from St. Louis to New Orleans was not lightly won, nor, for that matter, easily retained, for the Mississippi is ever a fickle flood, with changing landmarks and shifting channel. In all the great volume of literature bearing on the story of the river, the difficulties of its conquest are nowhere so truly recounted as in Mark Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_, the humorous quality of which does not obscure, but rather enhances its value as a picturesque and truthful story of the old-time pilot's life. The pilot began his work in boyhood as a "cub" to a licensed pilot. His duties ranged from bringing refreshments up to the pilot-house, to holding the wheel when some straight stretch or clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or bayou mouth, "cut-off," light, plantation and hamlet on either bank of the river all the way to St. Louis. Then, he had to learn them all in their opposite order, quite an independent task, as all of us who learned the multiplication table backward in the days of our youth, will readily understand. These landmarks it was needful for him to recognize by day and by night, through fog or driving rain, when the river was swollen by spring floods, or shrunk in summer to a yellow ribbon meandering through a Sahara of sand.