’You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale.  Trees won’t grow worth chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high.  It’s all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up.  A Cincinnati corpse don’t richen a soil any.’

And they talked about how Ohio water didn’t like to mix with Mississippi water.  Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you’ll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across.  Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but Ed says—­

’Why don’t you tell something that you’ve seen yourselves?  Now let me have a say.  Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard—­gaping and stretching, he was—­and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says—­

’"Why looky-here,” he says, “ain’t that Buck Miller’s place, over yander in the bend.”

’"Yes,” says I, “it is—­why.”  He laid his pipe down and leant his head on his hand, and says—­

’"I thought we’d be furder down.”  I says—­

’"I thought it too, when I went off watch”—­we was standing six hours on and six off—­“but the boys told me,” I says, “that the raft didn’t seem to hardly move, for the last hour,” says I, “though she’s a slipping along all right, now,” says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says—­

’"I’ve seed a raft act so before, along here,” he says, “’pears to me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin’ the last two years,” he says.

’Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around on the water.  That started me at it, too.  A body is always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn’t be no sense in it.  Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us.  I see he was looking at it, too.  I says—­

’"What’s that?” He says, sort of pettish,—­

’"Tain’t nothing but an old empty bar’l.”

’"An empty bar’l!” says I, “why,” says I, “a spy-glass is a fool to your eyes.  How can you tell it’s an empty bar’l?” He says—­

’"I don’t know; I reckon it ain’t a bar’l, but I thought it might be,” says he.

’"Yes,” I says, “so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body can’t tell nothing about it, such a distance as that,” I says.