These peculiar boats, so often encountered, found refuge in the frequent cut-offs behind the many islands of the river; for besides those islands which have been numbered, new ones are forming every year. At times, when the water is very high, the current will cut a new route across the low isthmus, or neck, of a peninsula, around which sweeps a long reach of the main channel, leaving the tortuous bend which it has deserted to be gradually filled up with snags, deposits of alluvium, and finally to be carpeted with a vegetable growth. In some cases, as the stream works away to the eastward or westward, it remains an inland crescent-shaped lake, numbers of which are to be found in the wilderness many miles from the parent stream. I have known the channel of the Mississippi to be shortened twenty miles during a freshet, and a steam-boat which had followed the great ox-bow bend in ascending the river, on its return trip shot through the new cut-off of a few hundred feet in length, upon fifteen feet of water where a fortnight before a forest had been growing. The area of land on both sides of the Mississippi subjected to annual overflow, like the country surrounding the Nile, in Egypt, is very large. There are localities thirty or forty miles away from the river where the height of the overflow of the previous year is plainly registered upon the trunks of the trees by a coating of yellow mud, which sometimes reaches as high as a man's head. This great region possesses vast tracts of rich land, as well as millions of acres of low swamps and bayou bottoms. The traveller, the hunter, the zologist, and the botanist can all find here in these rich river bottoms a ready reward for any inconveniences experienced on the route. Strange types of half- civilized whites, game enough to satisfy the most rapacious, beast and bird of peculiar species, and over all the immense forests of cypress, sweet-gums, Spanish-oaks, tulip-trees, sycamores, cotton-woods, white- oaks, &c., while the most delicate wild-flowers "waste their sweetness on the desert air." Across all this natural beauty the whisper of desolation casts a cloud, for here during most of the year arises the health-destroying malaria.