is a sobering apprenticeship, but as with so many things in Mark Twain, one can’t be sure how much is intended for comic effect or assatire. Mark Twain presents the antebellum world at some distance, with the subtext that the South has been been transformed into a different world over the past 30 years. The young man’s romantic notions of the river might be dispelled, but the entire account is a Romantic or romanticized vision of a vanished world.

Mark Twain tells this story in Chapter IX, “Continued Perplexities.” Having grown up along the Mississippi River, Twain had always found beauty in it. He remembered a specific sunset that was especially remarkable, with the light reflecting around a log and a variety of ripples in the water. Unfortunately, once he was trained as a steamboat pilot, Twain's view changed. He learned how to read the signs in the water so that he could successfully guide a boat through it, without getting hung up or stuck on any submerged obstacles. Now he could recognize and analyze all of the hazards that lay around that log, beneath those ripples, and along the shoreline. He approached the scene as a scientist or an engineer would, gauging the waterway for navigation and transportation, and not for mere beauty. He says,

I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! … All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.