farm could be set afloat it would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship, hospitality, and speed.  It was said of her that up-stream she could even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the current, but was a “love of a steamboat” nevertheless.  The Roe was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen “family guests” aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin.  The young pilot sometimes played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the “grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine,” or to an old horse by the name of Methusalem: 

Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,
A long time ago.

There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his efforts won him laurels.  He had a heavenly time on the John J. Roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast.  Bixby returned, made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named Brown.  Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer Pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young Clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by the arrangement.

But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and malicious.  In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview with Brown, also his last one.  For good reasons these occasions were burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially correct.  Brown had an offensive manner.  His first greeting was a surly question.

“Are you Horace Bigsby’s cub?”

“Bixby” was usually pronounced “Bigsby” on the river, but Brown made it especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and orders still more odious.  His subordinate soon learned to detest him thoroughly.  It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable deportment—­custom, discipline, even the law, required that—­but it must have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification of slaying Brown.  Time would bring revenge—­a tragic revenge and at a fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time planning punishments of his own.

I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed.  Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure and killed Brown.  I killed Brown every night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones—­ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment.

Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went to bed and killed him in “seventeen different ways—­all of them new.”