CHAPTER 21

A Section in My Biography

IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I

dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent

work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted

smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was

going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel

when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was

suspended, my occupation was gone.

I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada;

next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a

reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich

Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next,

an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I

became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other

rocks of New England.

In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years

that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a

pilot-house.

Let us resume, now.