“Jim, this is nice,” I says. “I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot cornbread.”

“Well, you wouldn’t a ben here ’f it hadn’t a ben for Jim. You’d a ben down dah in de woods widout any dinner, en gittn’ mos’ drownded, too; dat you would, honey. Chickens knows when it’s gwyne to rain, en so do de birds, chile.”

The river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days, till at last it was over the banks. The water was three or four foot deep on the island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom. On that side it was a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side it was the same old distance across⁠—a half a mile⁠—because the Missouri shore was just a wall of high bluffs.