It was the chance of fortune thus thrown away which, perhaps, led him to take up later with an engraving process--an adventure which lasted through several years and ate up a heavy sum. Altogether, these experiences in finance cost Mark Twain a fair-sized fortune, though, after all, they were as nothing compared with the great type-machine calamity which we shall hear of in a later chapter. XLIII BACK TO THE RIVER, WITH BIXBY Fortunately, Mark Twain was not greatly upset by his losses. They exasperated him for the moment, perhaps, but his violence waned presently, and the whole matter was put aside forever. His work went on with slight interference. Looking over his Mississippi chapters one day, he was taken with a new interest in the river, and decided to make the steamboat trip between St. Louis and New Orleans, to report the changes that had taken place in his twenty-one years of absence. His Boston publisher, Osgood, agreed to accompany him, and a stenographer was engaged to take down conversations and comments. At St. Louis they took passage on the steamer "Gold Dust"--Clemens under an assumed name, though he was promptly identified. In his book he tells how the pilot recognized him and how they became friends. Once, in later years, he said: "I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, where there was a big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." To heighten the illusion he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. The points along the river were nearly all new to him, everything had changed, but during high-water this mattered little. He was a pilot again--a young fellow in his twenties, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortunes in the stars. The river had lost none of its charm for him. To Bixby he wrote: "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever been in my life. How do you run Plum Point?" He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was a captain now, on the splendid new Anchor Line steamer "City of Baton Rouge," one of the last of the fine river boats. Clemens made the return trip to St. Louis with Bixby on the "Baton Rouge"--almost exactly twenty-five years from their first trip together. To Bixby it seemed wonderfully like those old days back in the fifties. "Sam was making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did," said Bixby, long after, to the writer of this history.