“In the olden times,” he wrote, “whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiriting to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public always had the idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case.... No engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the ‘doctor,’ and shut off the water supply from the boilers. In the ‘flush times’ of steam-boating, a race between two notorious fleet steamers was an event of vast importance.... Every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water, was removed.... When the _Eclipse_ and the _A. L. Shotwell_ ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the _Eclipse’s_ chimneys and that for one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things.” In 1870 the _Natchez_ ran from New Orleans to Natchez, a distance of 268 miles, in seventeen days seventeen hours. The most famous race of all, and one that created national interest, was that in the year 1870, between the _Robert E. Lee_ and the _Natchez_, from New Orleans to St. Louis, a distance of 1,218 miles. The former covered the journey in three days eighteen hours fourteen minutes, the latter in three days twenty-one hours fifty-eight minutes, but the officers of the _Natchez_ claimed seven hours for having had to stop through fog, and repairs to the machinery.