romantic landscape.  There Chillon brooded over the placid azure of the lake, there storms broke with jagged lightning in the Andes, there buxom girls trod out the purple grapes of some Italian vineyard.  The builders of each new steamer strove to eclipse all earlier ones in the brilliancy of these works of art, and discussion of the relative merits of the paintings on the “Natchez” and those on the “Baton Rouge” came to be the chief theme of art criticism along the river.  Bright crimson carpet usually covered the floor of the long, tunnel-like cabin.  Down the center were ranged the tables, about which, thrice a day, the hungry passengers gathered to be fed, while from the ceiling depended chandeliers, from which hung prismatic pendants, tinkling pleasantly as the boat vibrated with the throb of her engines.  At one end of the main saloon was the ladies’ cabin, discreetly cut off by crimson curtains; at the other, the bar, which, in a period when copious libations of alcoholic drinks were at least as customary for men as the cigar to-day, was usually a rallying point for the male passengers.

Far up above the yellow river, perched on top of the “Texas,” or topmost tier of cabins, was the pilot-house, that honorable eminence of glass and painted wood which it was the ambition of every boy along the river some day to occupy.  This was a great square box, walled in mainly with glass.  Square across the front of it rose the huge wheel, eight feet in diameter, sometimes half-sunken beneath the floor, so that the pilot, in moments of stress, might not only grip it with his hands, but stand on its spokes, as well.  Easy chairs and a long bench made up the furniture of this sacred apartment.  In front of it rose the two towering iron chimneys, joined, near the top by an iron grating that usually carried some gaudily colored or gilded device indicative of the line to which the boat belonged.  Amidships, and aft of the pilot-house, rose the two escape pipes, from which the hoarse, prolonged s-o-o-ugh of the high pressure exhaust burst at half-minute intervals, carrying to listeners miles away, the news that a boat was coming.

All this edifice above the hull of the boat, was of the flimsiest construction, built of pine scantling, liberally decorated with scroll-saw work, and lavishly covered with paint mixed with linseed oil.  Beneath it were two, four, or six roaring furnaces fed with rich pitch-pine, and open on every side to drafts and gusts.  From the top of the great chimneys poured volcanic showers of sparks, deluging the inflammable pile with a fiery rain.  The marvel is not that every year saw its quotum of steamers burned to the water’s edge, but, rather, that the quota were proportionately so small.