CHAPTER 8 PERPLEXING LESSONS
At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, ‘points,’ and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler—
‘What is the shape of Walnut Bend?’
He might as well have asked me my grandmother’s opinion of protoplasm. I reflec
