THE RIVER RISES.

109

dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped
with a farm or wood-yard opening at intervals, and sc you can't * get
out of the river' much easier than you could get out of a fenced
lane; but from Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter.
The river is more than a mile wide, and very deep—as much as two
hundred feet, in places. Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred
miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar
plantations, with only here and there a scattering'sapling or row of
ornamental China-trees. The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of
the plantations, from two to four miles. "When the first frost
threatens to come, the planters snatch off their crops in a. hurry.

ON A SHOEELESS SEA.

When they have finished grinding the cane, they form the refuse of
the stalks (which they call bagasse) into great piles and set fire to
them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse is used for fuel in
the furnaces of the sugar mills. Now the piles of damp bagasse burn
slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen.
An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the
Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this
embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to per-
haps a hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty
feet, as a general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable
gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when
the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at