To North America, with its fine long rivers, the steamboat has been, as Fulton in his foresight prophesied it would be, a highly useful institution. To the European mind the vast possibilities of the mighty Mississippi come as a shock when fully realised. To quote the very first sentence in one of the most popular books which that most popular writer, Mark Twain, ever wrote, “The Mississippi is well worth reading about”; so, also, we might add, are its steamboats, but in our limited space we can only barely indicate some of their essential features. The illustration facing page 258 shows a couple of these, the _Natchez_ and the _Eclipse_, racing against each other along this great river by the light of the moon at midnight. The first thing that strikes the attention is the enormous height to which the decks of these steamboats are raised. The pilot-house is higher still, and will be recognised as about midway between the water-line and the top of the long, lanky funnels. Even to Mark Twain the height seemed to be terrific. “When I stood in her pilot-house,” says the author of “Life on the Mississippi,” “I was so far above the water that I seemed to be perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little _Paul Jones_ a large craft. When I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel.... The boiler deck--i.e. the second storey of the boat, so to speak--was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deck-hands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers.” The accompanying picture, which is taken from a lithograph printed in 1855, shows two of the finest contemporary Mississippi steamboats. The _Eclipse_ was propelled by a high-pressure engine with a single cylinder, the paddle-wheels being 40 feet wide. Her two boilers were placed forward about 3½ feet above the deck, having internal return tubes, such as we discussed at an earlier stage. The waste gases returned through the tubes and escaped through the funnels, which rose 50 feet above the hurricane deck. This ship only drew 5 feet, and measured 360 feet long and 42 feet wide, whilst the hull was 8 feet deep. For fuel, rosin and pitch pine as well as coal were used. Mark Twain has left us some details of the keenness with which these and similar Mississippi steamboats used to race.