Southern Silhouettes

g up and down the watery highway that leads right by their door- yards, he must needs have been as unimpressionable as the gay effigy of the Indian chief that is perched aloft on the pilot-house of his big steamboat, not to have gotten his heart-strings inextricably tangled up with those that beat under the various familiar roof-trees he sees from his hurricane deck twice every week, once as he goes up stream under a pressure of steam and rush of hurrying paddle-wheels, scattering a miscellaneous cargo, and again when he travels cityward more leisurely, stopping to pick up a couple of bales of cotton here, a pile of cottonseed there, now to take on a shivering passenger whose whereabouts have been revealed by the flickering flame of an exhausted bonfire, or again landing amiably in response to a fluttering handkerchief held aloft in a girl's small hand. He belongs properly to the flush period of steam- boating on the Mississippi River, and no one knows better than he does that the glory of it is departed forever ; but in spite of intruding railroads and waning river traffic, he still holds the helm stiffly against all adverse currents, and when he shall have pulled the great bell-rope on his hurricane deck for the last time, and silently shall have submitted to the pilotage of the grim ferryman, another type will have been obliterated from time's blurred tablets ; for the changed condition of affairs precludes the possibility of another generation of Captain To...