for a watermelon).  Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty.  ’Why does he mix such elaborate and picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?’ Because they won’t have any other.  ’They want a big drink; don’t make any difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money.  You give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents—­will he touch it?  No.  Ain’t size enough to it.  But you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful—­red’s the main thing—­and he wouldn’t put down that glass to go to a circus.’  All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned by one firm.  They furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers ‘on salary.’  Good liquors?  Yes, on some of the boats, where there are the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it.  On the other boats?  No.  Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it.  ’Brandy?  Yes, I’ve got brandy, plenty of it; but you don’t want any of it unless you’ve made your will.’  It isn’t as it used to be in the old times.  Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else.  ’Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don’t drink.’  In the old times the barkeeper owned the bar himself, ’and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a trip.  A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune.  Now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will do.  Yes, indeedy, times are changed.  Why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on the Upper Mississippi, they don’t have any bar at all!  Sounds like poetry, but it’s the petrified truth.’

Chapter 34 Tough Yarns

Stack island.  I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence, Louisiana—­which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable gray beards of Spanish moss; ’restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the place,’ comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling—­also with truth.

A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a steamboat mate.  He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower packet.  He was an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man.  Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here.  One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way of discouragement of immigration,