A friend has sent me a new book, from England--_The Shakespeare Problem Restated_--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away back in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the _Pennsylvania_, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master. He was a prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's. For instance: What man dare, _I_ dare! Approach thou _what_ are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the _there_ she goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you _know_ she'd smell the reef if you crowded it like that? Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the _woods_ the first you know! stop the starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! . . . _Now_ then, you're all right; come ahead on the starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble: or be alive again, and dare me to the desert damnation can't you keep away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no, only the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby of a girl. Hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, I reckon, go down and call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!