’But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter, and call it superstition.  But you will always notice that they are people who have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher.  I went down the river once in such company.  We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at Hanging Dog; we grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted Beaver Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the ‘Graveyard’ behind Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight; we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into Cairo with nine feet of water in the hold—­may have been more, may have been less.  I remember it as if it were yesterday.  The men lost their heads with terror.  They painted the mare blue, in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should not have arrived at all.  The preacher was fished out and saved.  He acknowledged, himself, that he had been to blame.  I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.’

That this combination—­of preacher and gray mare—­should breed calamity, seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason.  I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day—­it may have been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day—­he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse.  This is literally true.

No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away.  I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere.  It was a bad region—­ all around and about Hat Island, in early days.  A farmer who lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house.  Between St. Louis and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;—­two hundred wrecks, altogether.

I could recognize big changes from Commerce down.  Beaver Dam Rock was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious ‘break;’ it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it.  A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more.  The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early destruction.  Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat.  The perilous ‘Graveyard,’ among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror to nobody.  One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely; the other, which used to lie close to the Illinois shore, is now on the Missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is—­but it is Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay Illinois taxes:  singular state of things!