rmy uniforms stood in knots at the
street corners.

The broad, fertile plain on both sides of the river, upon which
Louisville and New Albany are the principal towns, extends for eight
or nine miles below the rapids. The first hills to approach the stream
are those in Indiana. Salt River, some ten or twelve rods wide,
enters from the south twenty-one miles below New Albany, between
uninteresting high clay banks, with the lazy-looking little village
of West Point, Ky., occupying a small rise of ground just below
the mouth. The Kentucky hills come close to the bank, a mile or two
farther down, and then the familiar characteristics of the reaches
above Louisville are resumed--hills and bottoms, sparsely settled with
ragged farmsteads, regularly alternating.

At five o'clock we put in at a rocky ledge on the Indiana side, a
mile-and-a-half above Brandenburg. Behind us rises a precipitous hill,
tree-clad to the summit. The Doctor found up there a new phlox and
a pretty pink stone-crop, to add to our herbarium, while here as
elsewhere the bignonia grows profusely in every crevice of the rock.
At dark, two ragged and ill-smelling young shanty-boat men, who are
moored hard by, came up to see us, and by our camp-fire to whittle
chips and drone about hard times. But at last we tired of their idle
gossip, which had in it no element of the picturesque, and got rid of
them by hinting our desire to turn in.

The towns were few to-day, and small. Brandenburg, with eight hundred
souls, was the largest--a sleepy, ill-paved, shambling place,
with apparently nobody engaged in any serious calling; its chief
distinction is an architectural monstrosity, which we were told is
the court-house. The little white hamlet of New Amsterdam, Ind.
(650 miles), looked trim and bright in the midst of a green thicket.
Richardson's Landing, Ky., is a disheveled row of old deserted houses,
once used by lime-burners, with a great barge wrecked upon the beach.
At the small, characterless Indiana village of Leavenworth (658
miles), I sought a traveling photographer, of whom I had been told at
Brandenburg. My quest was for a dark-room where I might recharge my
exhausted kodak; but the man of plates had packed up his tent and
moved on--I would no doubt find him in Alton, Ind., fifteen miles
lower down.

We have had stately, eroded hills, and broad, fertile bottoms, hemming
us in all day, and marvelous ox-bows in the erratic stream. The
hillsides are heavi