The ‘cub’ pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot’s calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it.  And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires.  In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in White River, to save the lives of other men.  He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives.  He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned.  He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply—­

’I will not go.  If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay, no one will be lost but me.  I will stay.’

There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot’s.  There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that Memphis graveyard.  While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished.

The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead—­blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war—­one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again—­was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild ‘cub’ whom I used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch.  A heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief.  An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck.  Thornburgh’s ‘cub’ could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to ‘see what he would do.’  He was promptly gratified.  The bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad’s coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it.  The off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession.  He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation.  He ranged the whole boat—­visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude.