Mark Twain Compare and Contrast

            Mark Twain is one of America's famous writers. Along with many other works, he is the author of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" written in 1884. Many consider this book to be the most significant novel ever written. His name, Mark Twain (meaning "two fathoms deep"), is a pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. As a riverboat pilot, he began to use that name while living his life on the Mississippi River; on a river with many stories to tell.
             Twain's "Two Sides of the Mississippi" is a very captivating excerpt from his work, "Life on the Mississippi". He goes into much detail of what exactly the river holds; the beautiful moments that the one memory still holds for him, and the devastating truth behind it. Like everything else, it too holds its share of secrets.
             "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book - a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger," Twain mentions at the start of his first paragraph. As stated about, he feels the river has a showing of its own. He also states that it is very unlike a book that is read only once and set aside. Each time the river is read, it comes out completely different from the time before, never stopping its internal secrets. It has a new and contrasting story to tell everyday. It does this so as not lose the interest of the ones that are viewing it on a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day endless basis. .
             In the matter of the steamboat pilot, this book was especially different and had much more and deeper meaning to it then what is merely on the surface, much different from what it would be to a passenger. To the pilot, they state the river as being a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points. Every little quark of the river had a meaning behind it, and it wasn't always pretty. Points would consist of rocks, wrecks to come, and sometimes even death. The river isn't a pretty painted picture full of life and color.