“It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam’s piloting.  Men who were born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam was never much of a pilot.  Most of them will tell you that he was never a pilot at all.  As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now.  There were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand—­bars and changing shores, a pilot’s judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty.”

He had plenty of money now.  He could help his mother with a liberal hand, and he did it.  He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice.  From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new conditions.  Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to renewed consistent effort: 

What is a government without energy?—­[he says]—.  And what is a man without energy?  Nothing—­nothing at all.  What is the grandest thing in “Paradise Lost”—­the Arch-Fiend’s terrible energy!  What was the greatest feature in Napoleon’s character?  His unconquerable energy!  Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy.  And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it!

    I want a man to—­I want you to—­take up a line of action, and follow
    it out, in spite of the very devil.

Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for something in the way of a business opportunity.

His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and council.  Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry’s death, and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant.  In the exhilaration of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human outlet, self-approval.  He not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses it with characteristic freedom.

Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than otherwise—­a notion which I was slow to take up.  The other night I was about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that I could find a smoother bank somewhere.  I landed five miles below.  The storm came, passed away and did not injure us.  Coming up, day before yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds.  We couldn’t have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado.  And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are idle.  This is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me.  Not on account of the wages—­for that is a secondary