minutes, when one of Scroggs's eyes, getting a
little loose in the socket, and one of his ears
being shaved off, and Pike's abdomen being
several times punctured, it suddenly occurred
to the too amiable Arkansas gentlemen that
they had both had enough of it.

" 'Why, what's all this, mister?' says I to
the landlord.

" 'Oh! it's of no account, stranger,' says the
landlord to me—a fellow he was, weighing about
two hundred and fifty pounds, and with a face
like an Illonoy barn-door—' 'tain't nothin'—let
the boys enjoy 'emselves. Hist in a little
pizen, stranger'—and he set a black bottle and
a yellow bowl of black sugar before me. I
needn't say that I did not wait for the overseer,
but left by the first boat that landed at
Napoleon. I had had enough of roughing it in
Arkansas."

Just as the laughter following the colonel's
story was dying out in distant cackles—for all
the negro waiters were laughing, and so were
two newly-purchased slaves, going home to
their new plantation, and who used to sit all
day, like fowls with the pip, on two adjoining
cotton bales—we sighted Bolivar landing.

Now, as this landing will stand for Bayou la
Fourche, or any other landing above or below it,
I will describe it at full length. Innumerable
bends and "cuts off" we have passed this morning
already, and we are now going to stop for
half an hour at Bolivar landing, and take in
Mr. Chicard's cotton bales and some hundred
truckfuls of resinous pine-knots for our furnace
fires. Patience I must have, tiresome as the
delay is, for the boat will stop at four or five
other landings to-day, and so it will to-morrow,
and indeed every day, till we reach the great
emporium of cotton—New Orleans.

Our two tremendously tall black funnels, that
at night are sometimes half red-hot, grow very
excited at the thought of stopping. The safety
signal shrieks in its agony as if our furnaces
were fed with live slave babies. There is, too,
a curious unearthly sinking and rushing sound
in the funnels, that seems to me to be the fit
precursor of an explosion. The long-drawn
shriek echoes down the river, and frightens
three turkey buzzards that are perching on the
rusty wreck of a steamer's boiler.

N.B.—A friend, to encourage me, shows me
a cotton-tree, thirty feet high, in which the
body of the captain of the said steamer was
found to have been blown.

We slacken, we stop. I can see the square
cotton bales, bound up in sacking and banded
with iron, waiting on the high earth-banks
ready for us. Yonder, those almshouse-looking
row of white cottages—white roof and wall—are
the negroes' quarters; this is Mr. Chicard's
plantation. It you want to know how many
slaves he keeps, count the cabins that run
a little way in from the bank, reckon five
negroes, as an average, to each cabin, and you
have the total at once.

That larger cottage to the left, among the
locust-trees, is the overseer's; and that further
one, larger still, is Mr. Chicard's; but he is a
non-resident, and the overseer reigns here
supreme. That large bushy tree with small
leaves, something like the acacia's, is the
locust-tree—the carob-tree—the tree on whose
fruit John the Baptist fed in the wilderness
of Judæa. There are many sorts of locust.
This is the black locust; mark the fruit hanging
down in great black pods, like enormous
scarlet-runners gone to seed. They are good to
eat, sweet, and nutritious, and are imported into
England largely for cattle.

"Yahoop—ugh—horoo—yahoop!" Here is
a negro car-driver. He is driving two mules in
a tumbling waggon, and stands straddling on
the mere flat board that forms the vehicle. He
has come for Massa George Amos Chicard, his
master's son, and Massa George Amos's
luggage.

"Yahoop, Peacock—yahoop, Sunflower!
Here, get along wid dat cotton. O! yahoop,
Massa George, here's old Titus! How do,
Massa George? Yah! yah! yah!"

I think every one on board the Peytoona smiles
at Titus's gambols; and one planter, knowing I
was an Englishman (and of course an
Abolitionist), comes up to me and says triumphantly,
"The most light-hearted race in the whole
habitable world—no whipping here!"

Now a crowd of anxious men, with pale
brown horse-hide trunks and saddle-bags, crowd
to the gangway, or take final juleps and slings
at the bar of the Peytoona; while a gang of our
rough deck hands storm up the bank, urged by
our bull-dog mate as whipper-in, to drag in our
instalment of cotton bales—some hundred and
twenty—the blacks run to the wood-stack and
load themselves with pine-knots.

Now I, too, decant from the vessel, leaping
down on the landing planks from high spongy
bulwarks of cotton bales, and tumbling up the
crumbly earth-banks, through scraped cuttings
worn away by the sliding of twenty years' cotton
bales.

By this time some dozen men, in all varieties
of flannel shirts, no shirts, wide-awakes, and
general bandit-looking felt head-gear, are by
twos and twos lugging and dragging the cotton
bales down towards our ship. Every one of
them (a large per-centage of them are Paddys
and Murphys—a few mulattoes) carries a strong
double-pronged steel hook, something like the
hook hop-dealers use, or the movable hooks for
hanging meat employed in our butchers' shops.
With these calthrop implements they dig into
the sacking of the cotton bale and drag it
downward, or delay its progress, as the cotton
loader who uses it may think best.

The gang works moodily enough, save when,
now and then, the sacking breaks from a novice's
hook, and a runaway bale, floundering through
the ranks of the deck hands, blunders with
tremendous speed down the forty feet of steep
dusty earth-bank, and alights with a crash—after
felling several people with its very wind—almost
at the water's edge. I observe that the old
hands are rather afraid of these stray bales,