The Lower Mississippi (always excepting the still more frantic Missouri) is probably the most dangerous and least interesting river in the world to navigate. When not in actual danger, you are likely to be so far removed from it, high and dry on a sand bar, that the annoyance, like a certain period in our national history, has a tendency to try men’s souls. The following picture of an actual scene on this portion of the great river, may be looked upon as characteristic of the whole. On your right is a series of rocky bluffs, covered with a stunted growth of trees, before you an expanse of water ten miles long and two wide, on your left an array of sand bars and islands, where lie imbedded the wrecks of some fifty steamboats, and in the more remote distance a belt of thickly wooded bottom land. On the water, passing to and fro, are a number of steamers, and immediately in the foreground a solitary sawyer and the hull of a sunken steam-boat. This is the spot which has been rightly named the Grave Yard, for hundreds of souls at different times have passed from thence into eternity. When I left the turbid and unruly bosom of the Lower Mississippi, I felt towards it as a person would naturally feel towards an old tyrant who had vainly striven to destroy him in his savage wrath. I should remark in passing that the bottom lands of this river are not wholly without inhabitants; occasionally a lonely log cabin meets the eye, which is the only home of a miserable being who obtains his living by supplying the steamers with wood. Nailed to a stump before one of these squatter residences, which stood in the centre of a small clearing, I saw a board with the following inscription,—“This _farm_ for sale—price $1 50.” Though I could not help laughing at the unintentional wit of that sentence, it told me a melancholy tale of poverty, intemperance, and sickness, which are too often identified with the dangers of this wilderness.