re necessary for these modern locusts
to eat up all living vegetation that comes in their way. Leaving
the localities of their birth, they will move from place to place,
spreading a desolation as consuming as fire in their path.

All efforts to arrest their progress or annihilate them prove
unavailing. They seem to spring out of the ground, and fall from
the clouds; and the more they are tormented and destroyed, the more
perceptible, seemingly, is their power. We once witnessed the
invasion of the army-worm, as it attempted to pass from a desolated
cotton-field to one untouched. Between these fields was a wide ditch,
which had been deepened, to prove a barrier to the onward march of
the worm. Down the perpendicular sides of the trench the caterpillars
rolled in untold millions, until its bottom, for nearly a mile in
extent, was a foot or two deep in a living mass of animal life. To an
immense piece of unhewn timber was attached a yoke of oxen, and, as
this heavy log was drawn through the ditch, it seemed absolutely to
float on a crushed mass of vegetable corruption. The following
day, under the heat of a tropical sun, the stench arising from this
decaying mass was perceptible the country round, giving a strange and
incomprehensible notion of the power and abundance of this destroyer
of the cotton crop.

The change that has been effected by the result of the Rebellion, will
not be confined to the social system alone. With the end of slavery
there will be a destruction of many former applications of labor.
Innovations have already been made, and their number will increase
under the management of enterprising men.

In Louisiana several planters were using a "drill" for depositing the
cotton-seed in the ground. The labor of planting is reduced more than
one-half, and that of "scraping" is much diminished. The saving
of seed is very great--the drill using about a tenth of the amount
required under the old system.

One man is endeavoring to construct a machine that will pick cotton
from the stalks, and is confident he will succeed. Should he do so,
his patent will be of the greatest value. Owners of plantations
have recently offered a present of ten thousand dollars to the first
patentee of a successful machine of this character.

CHAPTER XLIII.

THE MISSISSIPPI AND ITS PECULIARITIES.

Length of the Great River, and the Area it Drains.--How Itasca Lake
obtained its Name.--The Bends of the Mississippi.--Curiou