But, seriously; was ever air so full of sound as these Arkansas swamps "upon a night in June!" It fairly vibrates with Yank! yank! yank! And yet over, and under, and through, all this metallic din, there shrills supreme the voice of strident cicadas, without number and without shame, and countless katydids that scream out their confidences to all the stars. It is really astonishing; a tour de force in Nature; a noisy miracle. I wonder Moses did not think of it, for such a plague might have done him credit, I think. At all events, the ancestors of Arabi Pasha would have been egregiously inconvenienced by such a hubbub. It is no use trying to talk; yank--Katy did--yank--yank. That is all you hear. So you may just as well sit and smoke quietly, and watch the moon-lit swamps and wonderful dark forests go by, with their perpetual flicker of restless fire-flies, twinkling in and out among the brushwood. If they would only combine into one central electric light! All the world would go to see them--the new "Brush-light." But there is very little sense of utility among fire-flies. They flicker about for their own amusement, and are of a frivolous, flighty kind; perpetually striking matches as if to look for something, and then blowing them out again. They strike only on their own box. But here comes a station--"Hope." We are soon past Hope; and then comes another swamp, with its pools, that have festered all day long in the sun, emitting the odours of a Zanzibar bazaar, and standing in the middle of them apparently are some clearings already filled with crops, and a hut or two cowering, as if they were wild beasts, just on the edge of the timber where the shadows fall the darkest. What kind of people are they that live in this terraqueous land? No race that is fit to rule can do it. No, nor even fit to vote. Some day, no doubt, the wise men of the world will dig up tufts of wool, and skulls with prognathous jaws, and label them "Negroids of the swamp age." Or they may fall into the error of supposing that the wool grew all over their bodies equally, and some Owen of the future discourse wisely of "the great extinct anthropoids of Arkansas." For in those wonderful days that are coming--when men will know all about the wind-currents, and steer through ocean-billows by chart, when doctors will understand the smallpox, and everybody have the same language, currency, religion, and customs duties, and when every newspaper offce will be fitted with patent reflectors, showing on a table in the editor's room all that is going on all over the world, and special correspondents will be as extinct as dodos, and when many other delightful means of saving time and trouble will have come to pass--then, no doubt, as the Mormons say, all the world will have become a "white and a delightsome people," and the commentators will explain away the passages in the ancient English which seem to point to the early existence of a race that was as black