Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a sort of channel for all the æsthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? "When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of _getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural passion of the novice lavished, for love of the _métier_, upon the only creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. "You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure æsthetic emotion, produced by a supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship.