258 LIPS ON T&JE MISSISSIPPI.

as traps to the adventurous navigators of its waters "by steam, who, b^tne
down upon these concealed dangers which pierce through the planks, very
often have not time to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the
bottom. There are no pleasing associations connected with the great
common sewer of the Western America, which pours out its mud into the
Mexican Gulf, polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth.
It is a river of desolation ; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful
rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine
it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the wonderful power
of steata.7

It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling
a pen; still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through
this noted visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the * great
common sewer,* it has a value. A value, though marred in the matter
of statistics by inaccuracies ; for the catfish is a plenty good enough
fish for anybody, and there are no panthers that are * impervious to
man.*

Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple,
Barrister at Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner
aboard, and feels as follows —

4 The Mississippi I It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt
myself afloat upon its waters. How often, in my schoolboy dreams, and in
my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the lordly
stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region to
which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its course to the
ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone !
Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length, steaming against its tide.
I looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a
great feature of external nature/

So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark
upon the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river.
Captain Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says —

* Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without
•ecsng a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting of the
deluge, would here have found them in abundance.*

first shall be last, etc. Just two hundred years ago, the
original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer,