The Mississippi[10] is in length, from its head waters to the _balize_ in the gulf of Mexico, about two thousand three hundred miles, and flows through an immense variety of country. The section through which it passes, before its junction with the Missouri, is represented as being elegantly diversified with woodlands, prairies, and rich bottoms, and the banks are lined with a luxuriant growth of plants and flowers. Before reaching the Missouri, the water of the Mississippi is perfectly limpid; but, from the mouth of that river it becomes turgid and muddy--flows through a flat, inundated country, and seems more like an immense flood, than an old and deep-channelled river. As far as great things can be compared to small, it much resembles, within its banks, the Rhone when flooded, as it sweeps through the department of Vaucluse, after its junction with the Saone. From St. Louis to New Orleans, a distance of twelve hundred miles, there are but six elevated points--the four Chickesaw bluffs, the Iron banks, and the Walnut hills. Numerous islands are interspersed through this river; and from the mouth of the Ohio, tall cotton-wood trees and cane-brakes grow in immense quantities along the banks; the latter, being evergreens, have a pleasing effect in the winter season. The windings of the Mississippi are, like those of the Ohio, constant, but not so serpentine, and some of them are of immense magnitude. You traverse every point of the compass in your passage up or down: for example, there is a bend near _Bayou Placquamine_, the length of which by the water is upwards of sixty miles, and from one point to the other across the distance is but three.