And, for another thing, his mind, which held the patterns of the currents in every river in the country and remembered the sites and quirks of all the locks on each one of half a thousand canals; his mind, a fabulous repository of water-lore, folkways and the mythology of the past; that mind which could calculate like lightning how much freight a barge could carry or how much coal made up a load – this crowded and magnificently functioning mind no longer had a stray corner left in which to store the Roman alphabet. Besides, he did not think in straight lines; he thought in subtle and intricate
...more
