through at last, and the very alligator, fathom
deep in the mud, awakes and knows that day
has dawned in Carolina.

And now, too, as the river's banks with the
tall brown reeds show themselves, I see a dead
tree, and, on its highest scathed bough, two black
specks which the captain tells me are bald-headed
eagles; and yonder is a crane, "poor Joe,"
disconsolate, fishing on one leg— as if he had just
felt the cramp, or symptoms of incipient gout
in the other, and were thinking whether he
should dine off fish to-day or not. Now I and
the rest, warming ourselves in the sun, come
down the steps from the high cabin and stand
on the lower deck, at the head of the vessels
just by the fires. There is a cask full of ashes
at our feet, and a great littering heap of coals
and pine-wood, together with a cogged wheel
going to some rice-mill on the river, in care of
those honest-looking engineers with hammers
and tool bags, who stand near the engine-room
door.

I am remarking to the captain, Mr. Noah
Sickles, who has been upholding the excellence
of alligator steaks, the curious fact, that every
second woman you meet at Savannah is dressed
in widow's weeds. Captain Noah replies, "Wall,
it ain't nohow healthy, that's a fact," and looks
over the ship's side, to see if he can show
me an alligator; a "regular whaler" having
been seen by him amusing himself on a log,
just by General Oglethorpe's house, not ten
days ago. Suddenly my eye falls on a square-
-looking case, carefully directed, that has been
thrown carelessly down by some nigger stevadores,
just by the dust heap, and half of it resting
upon the litter of coals that strews the
deck near the engine-room door. I think it is
a grand piano, for it is labelled "Peabody's
metallic hermetically sealed cases;" and
directed to

Mrs. Esther Greeley, Richmond, Virginia.
With care.                          Carriage paid.

It gives me rather a shudder to hear that what
I have mistaken for a grand piano is really the
body of

MR. JOSHUA GREELEY,

on his way home to the Richmond Cemetery,
and his inconsolable wife. There is something
ghastly in that pale man lying there, hid in his
metallic ambush, under our gossip about fish,
hawks, and alligators, and keeping all so
imperturbably to himself— yes, even to his (Mr. J.
Greeley's) thoughts about my incorrect English
pronunciation. But. I see in it another proof of
that recklessness and heedlessness of death that
so specially marks the American, and which still
remains a problem for the thinker. Perhaps the
best solution of it is, that such heedlessness arises
from no want of heart, but rather from that
perpetual looking to the future instead of to the
past which marks a new people, and from that
fierce disregard of life that is always to be
found in a frontier race, who are too busy and
too warlike to waste much time in sentimental
reflection.

The captain, turning round here, declares his
belief that we shall, see no "'gater to-day, for it
is getting late in the year." He then launches
out into stories of the 'gaters generally on
this river, and of their almost "supernateral"
cunning.

He declares that on one occasion some boys
at a rice-plantation near Augusta came to him,
and told him they had been shooting at a 'gater
for three days running and yet could not kill
him. They had found his nest in a swamp, and
had been waiting near it. So off he went with his
rifle, and aiming first at the soft pouches under
the 'gater's eyes, then at the boss on the crown
of the 'gater's head, turned the 'gater over with
the third shot, and made steaks of his flesh and
boots of his skin. Wall, I guess those boys
told the captain that they see that 'gater one
day pursue a deer across the river, and the
second day come floating up near some pigeons,
with a sort of garland of grape-vine twisted
round his head to hide it; and the captain had
reason to place some reliance in this, for, on
opening the 'gater's body, he found inside it two
pigeons whole and undigested. "Oh, he was a
reg'lar whaler!" says the captain. On this
immortal occasion of shooting the whaler, the
captain had recourse to the old lure of all 'gater-
-hunters— to a dog trained to yelp, and so attract
the 'gaters, who like dog above all other meats.
When a 'gater is floating down a stream, half
asleep, unless you catch the winking of his eye,
it is almost impossible, the captain says, to
distinguish the wretch from a rusty log that has
drifted from the bank.

The captain is an odd drunken being, with
much of the conversational traditions of the old
English coachman. If you notice a bundle of
fresh-caught cat-fish hanging, still panting with
life, at the cabin-door, he begins about negroes
fishing, and of the enormous weight of
occasional cat-fish; and if I refer to the late Mr.
Greeley in the large sardine-box, he has stories
to tell of the cholera in Savannah, when there
were dead-houses built in every quarter of
the city, and when carts full of coffins were
perpetually seen going round for bodies. But
as to his boat, he takes no heed of it, except to
lament occasionally that the engineers don't
know how to feed engine fires with anything
but pine-wood.

As to the passengers, he takes no care of them
either, except now and then to stop a "'gater
story," and assure the two millwrights that a
dug-put with an old niggur will be sure to be
waiting twenty miles further on, to paddle them
to Mr. Laroche's rice-plantation: as indeed
comes to pass.

Now we begin to get deeper among the
ricefields. They spread on either side of us, dotted
here and there with negroes' cabins, and now
and then by a planter's house. That wooden
tower on the bank, with open sides and a pierced
floor, is where they winnow the rice— the good
grains fall below, the chaff and dust fly off
above. Those green lined fields are the
ricefields, and those thin sharp green blades rising