Such she seemed from the dim shores. So came, so passed,
before the drowsy gaze of that strange attenuated fraction of humanity
which scantily peopled the waters and margins of the great river to win
from it the bare elements of livelihood or transit, winning them at a
death-rate not far below the immigrant's and in a vagabondage often as
wild as that of the water-fowl passing unseen in the upper darkness.
If to the contemplation of the Courteneys, father and son, the fair
craft, "with all her light and life, speeding, twinkling on and on
through the night," was "a swarm of stars," or "one little whole world,"
how shall we see her--with what sense of wonder and splendor--through
the eyes of the flatboatman or the swamper, the raftsman, the island
squatter, the trading-scow man, the runaway slave in the canebrake, the
woodyard man, or the "pirooter"--that degenerate heir, dwarfed to a
parasite, of the terrible, earlier-day land-pirates and river-wolves of
Plum Point and Crow's Nest Island? To such sorts, self-described as
human snapping-turtles and alligators, her peacock show of innumerable
lights was the jewelled crown of the only civilization they knew,
knowing it only with the same aloofness with which they knew the stars.
She woke them with the flutter of her wheels as of winged feet and
passed like a goddess using the river's points and islands for
stepping-stones, her bosom wrapped in a self-communion that gave no
least hint of its intolerable load of grief and strife.
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