consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphis is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never could accomplish on a transient boat.  I can “bank” in the neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers).  Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!—­and what vast respect Prosperity commands!  Why, six months ago, I could enter the “Rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greeting now they say, “Why, how are you, old fellow—­when did you get in?”

And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them.  Permit me to “blow my horn,” for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d—–­d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do not exhibit!  You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a “stern joy” in it.

We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain’s life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years.  He became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days.  Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph.  Where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner—­now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief.  The fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized—­more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions.  Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats.  Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings.

And we may pardon his vanity.  He could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the Association Rooms.  To this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success.  As the boys of Hannibal had gathered around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell.

He was much given to spinning yarns—­[writes one associate of those days]—­so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober.  If he laughed at all, it must have been inside.  It would have killed his hearers to do that.  Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers.  He may have written them himself.

Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens tell: