considered the most independent
set of people that navigate the great watery thoroughfare. All boats
and crafts avoid them and they have nothing to fear. A small hut of
the most temporary character, made of boards, and sometimes the bottom
of an old yawl turned up, is all the covering these amphibious and
nondescript watermen have. Upon landing, the raft is sold to the
proprietor of the wood yard. A log at a time is hauled upon the levee
by large chains attached to a stationary windlass. It is then sawed
into blocks four feet long, bolted up and put in cords which are
sold for four dollars. At one of the wood yards, thirty hands were
employed, and they sold $15,000 worth of wood per year.

I must ask pardon for so often recurring to Mr. Calhoun's great
"inland sea." It is to me the most interesting of all objects. I sat
upon the levee at Carrollton. I saw it in all its might and majesty,
nothing interposing to intercept the view. I thought of the countless
number of rills, of the many creeks, of the numerous lakes, and of the
untold rivers, rising in different regions and latitudes thousands
of miles apart, combining every variety of minerals known to the
continent--here passing by me, confined in one vast and deep channel,
lashing its banks with violence, and pressing onward and onward its
mighty waters to the briney sea! I cannot say, "to its ocean home,"
for it has none. It finds no resting place in the Gulf like other
rivers, but the sea groans and gives way to its immensity, and we find
its discoloured current far within the tropics! The reader of this
number being well acquainted with the low, marshy, dismal character of
the several mouths of the Mississippi, will doubtless be surprised at
being informed that there is a mountain there near four hundred feet
high! He has only to reflect that the river from Natchez to the Balize
is usually from three to four hundred feet deep; across the bar there
is only eighteen feet water; beyond the bar, just in the ocean, the
Gulf is unfathomable. So, then, the river in going into the sea, has
to pass over a mountain, which it is strange has not been washed
away, for the river, as before observed, is not arrested in its onward
course by the ocean to much extent.

The levee at Carrollton is considerably higher than the plain upon
which reposes the town. This great work that has occupied the labor,
time, and enterprize of Louisiana for years, appears to afford a
permanent and