Cerpt from life on the mississippi by mark twain
drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. and the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. she is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, all glass and "gingerbread," perched on top of the "texas" deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler-deck, the hurricane-deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch-pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. after ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.
my father was a justice of the peace, and i supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men, and could hang anybody that offended him. this was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. i first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that i could come out with a white apron on and shake a table-cloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later i thought i would rather be the deck-hand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. but these were only day-dreams they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. by and by one of our boys went away. he was not heard of for a long time. at last he turned up as apprentice engineer or "striker" on a steamboat. this thing shook the bottom out of all my sunday-school teachings. that boy had been notoriously worldly, and i just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and i left in obscurity and misery. there was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. he would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we all could see him and envy him and loathe him. and whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them.
how does twain's use of the word "stage-plank" in paragraph 2 affect the paragraph?
a. it explains where that part of the boat was and what it did.
b. it makes a difficult concept easier to comprehend.
c. it expresses twain's boyish admiration for steamboat lore.
d. it reinforces the idea that riverboats had many specialized aspects.