It is not easy to make out the penciled notes today.  The small, neat writing is faded, and many of them are in an abbreviation made only for himself.  It is hard even to find these examples to quote: 

MERIWETHER’S BEND

One-fourth less 3[3]—­run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in the willows about 200 (ft.) lower down than last year.

OUTSIDE OF MONTEZUMA

Six or eight feet more water.  Shape bar till high timber on towhead gets nearly even with low willows.  Then hold a little open on right of low willows—­run ’em close if you want to, but come out 200 yards when you get nearly to head of towhead.

The average mind would not hold a single one of these notes ten seconds, yet by the time he reached St. Louis he had set down pages that to-day make one’s head weary even to contemplate.  And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep—­they are still there; and now, after nearly sixty years, the old heartache is still in them.  He must have bought a new book for the next trip and laid this one away.

To the new “cub” it seemed a long way to St. Louis that first trip, but in the end it was rather grand to come steaming up to the big, busy city, with its thronging waterfront flanked with a solid mile of steamboats, and to nose one’s way to a place in that stately line.

At St. Louis, Sam borrowed from his brother-in-law the one hundred dollars he had agreed to pay, and so closed his contract with Bixby.  A few days later his chief was engaged to go on a very grand boat indeed—­a “sumptuous temple,” he tells us, all brass and inlay, with a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain.  This part of learning the river was worth while; and when he found that the regiment of natty servants respectfully “sir’d” him, his happiness was complete.

But he was in the depths again, presently, for when they started down the river and he began to take account of his knowledge, he found that he had none.  Everything had changed—­that is, he was seeing it all from the other direction.  What with the four-hour gaps and this transformation, he was lost completely.

How could the easy-going, dreamy, unpractical man whom the world knew as Mark Twain ever have persisted against discouragement like that to acquire the vast, the absolute, limitless store of information necessary to Mississippi piloting?  The answer is that he loved the river, the picturesqueness and poetry of a steamboat, the ease and glory of a pilot’s life; and then, in spite of his own later claims to the contrary, Samuel Clemens, boy and man, in the work suited to his tastes and gifts, was the most industrious of persons.  Work of the other sort he avoided, overlooked, refused to recognize, but never any labor for which he was qualified by his talents or training.  Piloting suited him exactly, and he proved an apt pupil.