Read the passage. Read this sentence from Paragraph 5.
The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had
questioned my ability to run any crossing between Caire and
New Orleans without help or instruction, I should have felt
irreparably hurt
Which phrase from the sentence best shows that the narrator
worked as a cub pilot on a steamboat?
o "without help or instruction"
excerpt from "A Cub Pilot"
from Life on the Mississippi
by Mark Twain
There is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until
he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of
perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with
merely thinking a thing is so and so, he must know it for this is
one of the "exact" sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked
upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble
-- phrase, "I think," instead of the vigorous one, "I know!"
One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know
every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it
with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in
New York and travel up and down it, conning its features
patiently until you know every house and window and lamppost
nort and know them so accurately
"anybody had questioned"
"about bank-full
"felt irreparably hurt