They are enchanting. First, there is the eloquence of silence;
for a deep hush broods everywhere. Next, there is the haunting
sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry
and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in stealthily;
the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast
stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water
is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist,
there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf;
the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying.
Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings
develop into a jubilant riot of music. You see none of the birds;
you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems
to sing itself. When the light has become a little stronger,
you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable.
You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage
near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you;
upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint
has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape
beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one,
miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere
dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it
and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror,
and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and
the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it.
Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful;
and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush
here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will
yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something
that is worth remembering.
We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning–
scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times,
Captain Poe had a small stern-wheel boat, for years the home
of himself and his wife. One night the boat struck a snag in
the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with astonishing suddenness;
water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got aft.
So he cut into his wife’s state-room from above with an ax;
she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than
was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten
boards and clove her skull.
This bend is all filled up now–result of a cut-off; and the same
agent has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend,
and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track
of passing steamers.
Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being
of recent birth–Arkansas City. It was born of a railway; the Little Rock,
Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there.
We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was.
‘Well,’ said he, after considering, and with the air of one who
wishes to take time and be accurate, ‘It’s a hell of a place.’
A description which was photographic for exactness. There were
several rows and clusters of shabby frame-houses, and a supply of mud
sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that article
for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided.
There were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen
rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened
to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their
visiting and shopping on foot once more. Still, it is a thriving place,
with a rich country behind it, an elevator in front of it,
and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton-seed oil.
I had never seen this kind of a mill before.
Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it
is worth $12 or $13 a ton now, and none of it is thrown away.
The oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost if not
entirely odorless. It is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation,