swiftly around the bend and into safety once more. The next day
there was the Petite Gulf, which bothered Xavier very little, and the
day after that we came in sight of Natchez on her heights and guided our
boat in amongst the others that lined the shore, scowled at by lounging
Indians there, and eyed suspiciously by a hatchet-faced Spaniard in a
tawdry uniform who represented his Majesty's customs. Here we stopped
for a day and a night that Xavier and his crew might get properly drunk
on tafia, while Nick and I walked about the town and waited until his
Excellency, the commandant, had finished dinner that we might present
our letters and obtain his passport. Natchez at that date was a
sufficiently unkempt and evil place of dirty, ramshackle houses and
gambling dens, where men of the four nations gamed and quarrelled and
fought. We were glad enough to get away the following morning, Xavier
somewhat saddened by the loss of thirty livres of which he had no
memory, and Nick and myself relieved at having the passports in our
pockets. I have mine yet among my papers.

"Natchez, 29 de Junio, de 1789.

"Concedo libre y seguro paeaporte a Don David Ritchie para que pase a la
Nueva Orleans por Agna. Pido y encargo no se le ponga embarazo."

A few days more and we were running between low shores which seemed to
hold a dark enchantment. The rivers now flowed out of, and not into the
Mississippi, and Xavier called them bayous, and often it took much skill
and foresight on his part not to be shot into the lane they made in the
dark forest of an evening. And the forest,--it seemed an impenetrable
mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths: the live-oak (chene
vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and
twined in the mistletoe's death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the
conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the
bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume
over the waters, and wondrous flowers and vines and trees with French
names that bring back the scene to me even now with a whiff of romance,
bois d'arc, lilac, grande volaille (water-lily). Birds flew hither and
thither (the names of every one of which Xavier knew),--the whistling
papabot, the mournful bittern (garde-soleil), and the night-heron
(grosbeck), who stood like a sentinel on the points.

One night I awoke with the sweat starting from my brow, trying to
collect my senses