With repeated last calls of farewell and wavings of hat and handkerchief, we swung out into the current and drifted swiftly away from our over-hospitable host and hostess. A few minutes carried us below the cultivated upper portion of the island, and I noticed Don Pedro eying the wooded remainder with a peculiar intentness. Afterwards I was told that certain of the huge cypresses shadowed a bayou, in which at the time we passed there were already being collected boats and munitions for the flotilla that was to form the nucleus of Colonel Burr's ill-starred expedition. [Illustration: "We swung out into the current and drifted swiftly away"] Of this and the nefarious plans since charged to that great dreamer, I then had not the remotest suspicion, and soon turned my attention from the pondering senor. Scattered up and down the midchannel for three miles or more was a string of barges, flats, and keelboats, laden with flour, lumber, and other up-river products, for the market at New Orleans. Like ourselves, they were coming down from the higher shipping-ports with the Spring fresh. At my request, Alisanda kept within the house, until, by a vigorous bit of sculling, I had sent our craft beyond earshot of the nearest of these barges. The huge, clumsy craft, which must have been upwards of four hundred tons burden, was manned by the usual crew of twenty-five or thirty rowdy, drunken rivermen, whose ribaldry and rude jests were unfitted for the ears of a gentlewoman. By adroit steering and an occasional return to my sculling, we were fortunate enough to keep our distance from these other boats, and for the greater part of the day I had the pleasure of pointing out to Alisanda the beauties of the river scenery. Rightful in fact, and most appropriate in truth, is the interpretation which tells us that "Ohio" means "the beautiful river." A day of clear, warm sunshine, marred by only one shower, gave us our first chance to share the ever-shifting views of headlands and rolling, wooded hills. Though the forest was as yet only half in leaf, and the height of the flood covered all other than the highest of the bottoms, the nature of the scene was an unending wonder to my companions, who in turn compared it with the sterile mountains of Old Spain and the deserts of New Spain. They could not liken it to the tamed woodlands of England; for, notwithstanding a generation of settlement, with the river long since the main artery of a great commerce, these banks were as yet in many places unbroken wilderness, the abode of elk and deer and wolf, of tigerish panther and lumbering bear.