In The Heyday Of The Steamboating Prosperity, The River From End To End
Was Flaked With Coal-Fleets And Timber Rafts, All Managed By Hand, And
Employing Hosts Of The Rough Characters Whom I Have Been Trying To
Describe.
I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used
to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,
- An acre or so of white, sweet-
smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or
four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm-
quarters, - and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their
big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning
successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get
on these rafts and have a ride.
By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed
and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place, a
chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts,
during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course
of five or six more. The book is a story which details some passages in
the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard
of my time out west, there. He has run away from his persecuting
father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice,
truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the
widow's has also escaped.
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