couple, with whom we had a long talk, and who were perhaps a very
good sample of that kind of people in the West.
The landlord was a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow (not so very
old either, for he was but just turned sixty, I should think), who
had been out with the militia in the last war with England, and had
seen all kinds of service, – except a battle; and he had been very
near seeing that, he added: very near. He had all his life been
restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change;
and was still the son of his old self: for if he had nothing to
keep him at home, he said (slightly jerking his hat and his thumb
towards the window of the room in which the old lady sat, as we
stood talking in front of the house), he would clean up his musket,
and be off to Texas to-morrow morning. He was one of the very many
descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seem destined
from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army: who
gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving
home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of
their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering
generation who succeed.
His wife was a domesticated, kind-hearted old soul, who had come
with him, ‘from the queen city of the world,’ which, it seemed, was
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Philadelphia; but had no love for this Western country, and indeed
had little reason to bear it any; having seen her children, one by
one, die here of fever, in the full prime and beauty of their
youth. Her heart was sore, she said, to think of them; and to talk
on this theme, even to strangers, in that blighted place, so far
from her old home, eased it somewhat, and became a melancholy
pleasure.
The boat appearing towards evening, we bade adieu to the poor old
lady and her vagrant spouse, and making for the nearest landingplace,
were soon on board The Messenger again, in our old cabin,
and steaming down the Mississippi.
If the coming up this river, slowly making head against the stream,
be an irksome journey, the shooting down it with the turbid current
is almost worse; for then the boat, proceeding at the rate of
twelve or fifteen miles an hour, has to force its passage through a
labyrinth of floating logs, which, in the dark, it is often
impossible to see beforehand or avoid. All that night, the bell
was never silent for five minutes at a time; and after every ring
the vessel reeled again, sometimes beneath a single blow, sometimes
beneath a dozen dealt in quick succession, the lightest of which
seemed more than enough to beat in her frail keel, as though it had
been pie-crust. Looking down upon the filthy river after dark, it
seemed to be alive with monsters, as these black masses rolled upon
the surface, or came starting up again, head first, when the boat,
in ploughing her way among a shoal of such obstructions, drove a
few among them for the moment under water. Sometimes the engine
stopped during a long interval, and then before her and behind, and
gathering close about her on all sides, were so many of these illfavoured
obstacles that she was fairly hemmed in; the centre of a
floating island; and was constrained to pause until they parted,
somewhere, as dark clouds will do before the wind, and opened by
degrees a channel out.
In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the
detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there to take in wood,
lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held
together. It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted
‘Coffee House;’ that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to
which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a
month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi. But
looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of