a crashing and rattling as made
one wonder at first what the deuce was the row. In one instance, whilst
at dinner, a huge branch burst open a side door, and nearly impaled a
French conjurer of celebrity on his way to New Orleans. We were nearly a
hundred souls on board, and each day our limits grew more and more
circumscribed; for the side galleries were filled in with bales of
cotton, the windows blocked up, at last the very doorways, all but one:
lights were burned in the cabin day and night: the Carolina became, in
fact, a floating mass of cotton, which, had the season been dry, one
unlucky spark might have set in a blaze--an accident by no means
unknown; luckily, the rain continued to fall more or less daily, as is
usual at this season.

Our passengers were principally composed of the planters whose cotton
had already been shipped; they were a rough but merry set of fellows,
and many of them exceedingly intelligent; kinder or better-disposed men
I never met: for their own health's sake I could have desired to see the
bar less prosperous; their visits to that quarter were over frequent:
not that an instance of inebriety occurred on board, but the stimulant,
together with the quantity of tobacco they use, must, I am sure, be
ruinous to both health and enjoyment. I found most of them complaining
of dyspepsia, but had much difficulty to induce them to admit the
possibility of their own habits being at least as much the cause as the
climate.

The cotton-grounds along the whole cultivated line of this river are
rich beyond conception; fields of a mile square were here just picked,
and yet white as snow from the after-growth. Many of them would have
been worth re-picking had hands been procurable; on every side fresh
clearings are going on, and the produce next season will be greatly
increased in consequence of the stimulus derived from the high prices of
this year.

A night scene, whilst lying beneath some of the noble bluffs towering
above the river, was often worthy the delay we paid for it. One or two
of these heights were two hundred feet perpendicular, or nearly so:
from the summit there is laid down in a slanting direction a slide or
trough of timber, wide enough to admit of the passage of a cotton bale;
at the bottom of the bluff this slide rests upon a platform of loose
planks, alongside of which the boat is moored; the cotton-bag is guided
into the slide at top, and thence, being launched, is left to find its