The next few months showed me strange things.  On the same day that we held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river.  The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away.  It required the nicest steering to pick one’s way through this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point; and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers.  Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent.  Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction.  We often hit white logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night.  A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.

Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious timber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi, coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from ‘Posey County,’ Indiana, freighted with ’fruit and furniture’—­the usual term for describing it, though in plain English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins.  Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned with usury.  The law required all such helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken.  All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up, right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice, with the backwoods ‘whang’ to it, would wail out—­

‘Whar’n the ——­ you goin’ to!  Cain’t you see nothin’, you dash-dashed aig-suckin’, sheep-stealin’, one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!’

Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again.  And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck.  Once, at night, in one of those forest-bordered