Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/206

 of painted woodwork, and a long and irregular line of smoking chimneys. The scene never varied save with the varying tints of weather and season. Sometimes the hills were gray through an atmosphere of rain,—sometimes they vanished altogether in an autumn fog; but the port never changed. And in summer or spring, at the foot of the iron stairway leading up to a steamboat agency in the great middle building facing the river, there was a folding stool—which no one ever tried to steal—which even the most hardened wharf thieves respected,—and on that stool, at the same hour every day, a pleasant-faced old man with a very long white beard used to sit. If you asked anybody who it was, the invariable reply was: "Oh! that's old Captain; used to be in the New Orleans trade;—had to give up the river on account of rheumatism;—comes down every day to look at things."

Wonder whether the old captain still sits there of bright afternoons, to watch the returning steamers panting with their mighty run from the Far South,—or whether he has sailed away upon that other river, silent and colorless as winter's fog, to that vast and