mble way were imitating the vices of the more enlightened CASTE. When
symptoms of a serious riot appeared, the military were called out. On
more than one occasion, the sailors on one side to the number of two
or three hundred, and the Kentucky and Tennessee boatmen of equal
or superior numbers on the other, were drawn up in battle array,
and commenced a desperate contest with hard knuckles, bludgeons, and
missiles of every description, revolvers and bowie-knives had not at
that time been introduced into such MELEES, when the military made their
appearance, and the belligerents were dispersed.

Fighting on the levee became an established custom, and was sometimes
resorted to as an exciting pastime. If a couple of "old salts"
quarrelled under the stimulus of a glass of grog, instead of bandying
words, and pouring into each other a broadside of vulgar epithets, they
quietly adjourned to the levee and took it out in hard knocks, and after
having fought with desperation, and pummelled each other out of all
resemblance to human beings, they would go on board their ship and
cheerfully attend to their duties.

One day I watched with no little interest a pitched battle between a
wooden-legged sailor and a French stevedore. The sailor, although he was
wanting in one of his limbs, was said to be a valuable seaman one who
would never shrink from work of any kind. He would go aloft in a gale or
in a calm, and lend a hand at reefing or furling as promptly as any man
in the ship. His wooden leg was so constructed, with iron machinery,
at the extremity, that he could stand on a ratline or a hawse without
difficulty. The stevedore, who was a powerful fellow, expected to make
short work of the cripple, taking it for granted that Jack could not
stand firm on his pins; and indeed, almost at the beginning of the
combat, the man with the timber toe was capsized. His opponent,
flushed with success, and disregarding the rules of honorable warfare,
determined to give Jack a drubbing while he lay sprawling on his back.
But as he approached him with mischievous intent, his fist clinched and
his eyes flashing fire and fury, Jack watched his opportunity, and
gave him two or three kicks with his iron-shod wooden leg in swift
succession. They were so strongly and judiciously planted that the
astonished Frenchman was compelled to measure HIS length on the ground,
from which, to is great pain and mortification, he was unable to rise,
and wooden-leg ho