ame-hunters;
heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters,
happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all
these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern
speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch,
Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in
cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and
Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and
United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto,
quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews;
Mormons and Papists Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers
and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and
clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests.
In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all
kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.

As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood,
maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals
blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like
picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned
the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the
Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and
opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan
and confident tide.

CHAPTER III.

IN WHICH A VARIETY OF CHARACTERS APPEAR.

In the forward part of the boat, not the least attractive object, for a
time, was a grotesque negro cripple, in tow-cloth attire and an old
coal-sifter of a tamborine in his hand, who, owing to something wrong
about his legs, was, in effect, cut down to the stature of a
Newfoundland dog; his knotted black fleece and good-natured, honest
black face rubbing against the upper part of people's thighs as he made
shift to shuffle about, making music, such as it was, and raising a
smile even from the gravest. It was curious to see him, out of his very
deformity, indigence, and houselessness, so cheerily endured, raising
mirth in some of that crowd, whose own purses, hearths, hearts, all
their possessions, sound limbs included, could not make gay.

"What is your name, old boy?" said a purple-faced drover, putting his
large purple hand on the cripple's bushy wool, as if it were the curled
forehead of a black steer.

"Der Black Guinea dey c