ling power is produced from logs of
wood. There, also, most of the freight is stowed, on account of the
light capacity of the hold; and on every part, not occupied by the
machinery and boilers, may be seen piles of cotton-bales, hogsheads of
tobacco, or bags of corn, rising to the height of many feet. This is
the freight of a down-river-boat. On the return trip, of course, the
commodities are of a different character, and consist of boxes of Yankee
furniture, farming implements, and "notions," brought round by ship from
Boston; coffee in bags from the West Indies, rice, sugar, oranges, and
other products of the tropical South.

On the after-part of this deck is a space allotted to the humbler class
of travellers known as "deck passengers." These are never Americans.
Some are labouring Irish--some poor German emigrants on their way to the
far North-West; the rest are negroes--free, or more generally slaves.

I dismiss the hull by observing that there is a good reason why it is
built with so little depth of hold. It is to allow the boats to pass
the shoal water in many parts of the river, and particularly during the
season of drought. For such purpose the lighter the draught, the
greater the advantage; and a Mississippi captain, boasting of the
capacity of his boat in this respect, declared, that all he wanted was
_a heavy dew upon, the grass, to enable him to propel her across the
prairies_!

If there is but little of a Mississippi steamboat under the water, the
reverse is true of what may be seen above its surface. Fancy a
two-story house some two hundred feet in length, built of plank, and
painted to the whiteness of snow; fancy along the upper story a row of
green-latticed windows, or rather doors, thickly set, and opening out
upon a narrow balcony; fancy a flattish or slightly rounded roof covered
with tarred canvas, and in the centre a range of sky-lights like glass
forcing-pits; fancy, towering above all, two enormous black cylinders of
sheet-iron, each ten feet in diameter, and nearly ten times as high, the
"funnels" of the boat; a smaller cylinder to one side, the
"'scape-pipe;" a tall flag-staff standing up from the extreme end of the
bow, with the "star-spangled banner" flying from its peak;--fancy all
these, and you may form some idea of the characteristic features of a
steamboat on the Mississippi.

Enter the cabin, and for the first time you will be struck with the
novelty of the scene. You will