Now This
Was 'something Like,' And So I Began To Take Heart Once More To Believe
That Piloting Was A Romantic Sort Of Occupation After All.
The moment we
were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself
with joy.
She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I
looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a
splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on
every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed
chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and
the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost. The
boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak) was as
spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there
was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts down
there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring
from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers! This
was unutterable pomp. The mighty engines - but enough of this. I had
never felt so fine before. And when I found that the regiment of natty
servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete.
Chapter 7 A Daring Deed
WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost.
Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but I could
make neither head nor tail of it:
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