ut from the foot of the Cumberland, nearly half-way into the
main river. This quickly unites the two streams, and the reinforced
Ohio is thereafter perceptibly widened.

Tramp steamers are numerous, on these lower reaches. We have seen
perhaps a dozen such to-day, stopping at the farm landings as well as
at the crude and infrequent hamlets,--mere notches of settlement in
the wooded lines of shore,--doing a small business in chance cargoes
and in passengers who flag them from the bank. A sultry atmosphere
has been with us through the day. The glassy surface of the river
has, when not lashed into foam by passing boats, dazzled the eyes most
painfully. The hills, from below Stewart's Island, have receded on
either side, generally leaving either low, broad, heavily-timbered
bottoms, or high clay banks which stretch back wide plains of yellow
and gray corn-land--frequently inundated, but highly productive. Now
and then the encroaching river has remained too long in some belt of
forest, and we have great clumps of dead trees, which spring aloft in
stately picturesqueness, thickly-clad to the limb-tips with Virginia
creeper. A bit of shaly hillside occasionally abuts upon the river,
though less frequently than above; and often such a spur has lying
at its feet a row of half-immersed boulders, delicately carpeted with
mosses and with clinging vines.

The Tennessee River (918 miles), the largest of the Ohio's
tributaries, is, where it enters, about half the width of the latter.
Coming down through a broad, forested bottom, with several pretty
islands off its mouth, it presents a pleasing picture. Here again the
government has been obliged to put in costly works to stop the ravages
of the mingling torrents in the soft alluvial banks. The Ohio, with
the united waters of the Cumberland and the Tennessee, henceforth
flows majestically to the Mississippi, a full mile wide between her
shores.

Paducah (13,000 inhabitants), next to Louisville Kentucky's most
important river port, lies on a high plain just below the Tennessee.
It is a stirring little city, with the usual large proportion of
negroes, and the out-door business life everywhere met with in the
South. Saw-mills, iron plants, and ship-yards line the bank; at
the wharf are large steamers doing a considerable business up the
Cumberland and Tennessee, and between Paducah and Cairo and St. Louis;
and there is a considerable ferry business to and from the Illinois
suburb of Br