’Oh, I knew him.  Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh.  He was only in the Southern trade six months.  That was thirteen years ago.  I made a trip with him.  There was five feet in the upper river then; the “Henry Blake” grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half; the “George Elliott” unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the “Sunflower”—­’

‘Why, the “Sunflower” didn’t sink until—­’

’I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December; Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the “Sunflower.”  Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the 15th.  His brother died two years after 3rd of March,—­erysipelas.  I never saw either of the Hardys,—­they were Alleghany River men,—­but people who knew them told me all these things.  And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same, and his first wife’s name was Jane Shook—­she was from New England—­and his second one died in a lunatic asylum.  It was in the blood.  She was from Lexington, Kentucky.  Name was Horton before she was married.’

And so on, by the hour, the man’s tongue would go.  He could not forget any thing.  It was simply impossible.  The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events.  His was not simply a pilot’s memory; its grasp was universal.  If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory.  And then without observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer’s relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too.

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune.  To it, all occurrences are of the same size.  Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one.  As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore.  Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject.  He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside.  Mr. Brown would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.  He would be ‘so full of laugh’ that he could hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog’s breed and personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner’s family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary