Making shooks for New Orleans――The building of the flat-boats――Davy goes to Reelfoot Lake――A feeling of awe comes over Davy――The story of a strange and mysterious place――Something about the night riders and their neighbors――Where some of Davy’s descendants now reside――The padre’s story of the Reelfoot earthquake and the destruction of New Madrid――The earth trembles beneath his listeners’ feet. After the harvest was over in the fall of 1825, the year after Davy’s term as Representative had expired, he saw a prospect of making money by the shipment of staves to New Orleans. There was an unlimited supply of white oak on the Obion River and on the shores of a lake about twenty-five miles from his home in the woods. He took a couple of horses and an outfit, and started for the lake, which he reached the next day. It is not known just what Davy meant by “the lake” referred to, but it was probably one of the widened parts of the slow and tortuous river, not far above Island Number Two, at the junction of the Obion with the Mississippi. As soon as he arrived on the ground, Davy hired men to build two flat-boats and get out the staves. The staves were split from the straight-grained oak logs cut in the woods and hauled to the water. They were often called shooks, and when ready for market were made up in bundles for shipment. When used, they had to be hewed and trimmed with draw-knives, then stood on end in a circle, when they were hooped with hickory bands into hogsheads and fitted with heads. The hogsheads were used for molasses and for the cane sugar produced in the South. Davy worked with the men he had hired, overseeing the plans for the boats, until everything was well under way, when he had a visit from a neighbor on Reelfoot Lake, who wanted him to take a trip to his part of the country, less than thirty miles distant. Having heard something about this strange body of water, Davy agreed to go, and was in sight of his neighbor’s clearing before sunset of the day following. As he saw the lake for the first time, a feeling of awe came over him, as if he looked into a vista of some old dead or dying world. A fair expanse of shining water, with islands bright with the autumn glories of deciduous trees, and skirted by hills that were dark with pine and hemlock or thickly set with oak and maple groves, was dotted with black and decaying stumps that rose above the surface, high in air, like the masts of a sunken fleet. In places, only the tops of the sunken trees were seen, but everywhere, like the wreck that covers the sea after storm and battle have done their work, were floating logs and drifting limbs, charred and unsightly relics of the wilderness.