I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.' That this combination--of preacher and gray mare--should breed calamity, seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason.

I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day--it may have been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day--he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse.

This is literally true.
No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away.
I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it was between St.Louis and Cairo somewhere.

It was a bad region--all around and about Hat Island, in early days.

A farmer who lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house.