NOTEBOOK
it. 8 ft. bank on point opp. Densford's—or rather up
shore at head of timber. ...
Fall's City came up behind us. Ran Bayou Goule—no
lead. Had 3 fathoms in Glasscock's—ran no channel—
ran Diamond chute. When any water at all in lower
chute, below Diamond good.
All of which has but little interest today, but
when one remembers the scene amid which these
cryptographic memoranda were made, the rush-
ing black river, the blind channels behind
islands, often half choked with logs and un-
certain of passage (yet one must chance them)
the lonely pilot-house with its single watcher on
whom the fate of the steamboat with its cargo
of human lives and merchandise depended, there
is a kind of tense fascination in the brief, terse,
entries.
Mark Twain left the river a year after that
last entry was made, and after a brief, unbrilliant
war experience found himself in Virginia City,
Nevada, a reporter on the Territorial Enter-
prise, the paper owned by Joseph T. Goodman.
Probably it was here that he formed the habit
of keeping regular notebooks, though the first to
be preserved does not begin until the end of
1864, when he had followed his Virginia City
experience with some months of newspaper work
in San Francisco, and following some complica-
tions there, had retired to the remoteness of
James Gillis's cabin on Jackass Hill near Tuttle-
town, California. This was at the end of the
year, and on New-Year's night he makes this
entry.
New Year's nieht 186^, at Vallecito, magnificent lunar
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