Is it worth while saying that the swamp forest continued? I think not. So please understand it, and think of the country as a flooded forest, with wonderful brown waterways stretching through the trees, just as glades of grass do elsewhere, with here and there, every now and again, a broad river-like bayou of coffee stretching to right and left, and winding out of sight round the trees, and every now and again a group of wooden cabins, most picturesquely squalid, and inhabited by coloured folk. Does anybody know anything of these people? Are they cannibals, or polygamous, or polyandrous, or amphibious? Surely a decade of unrestricted freedom and abundant food in such solitudes as these, must have developed some extraordinary social features? At all events, it is very difficult to believe that they are ordinary mortals. The hamlets are few and far between, and it is only once or twice during the day that we strike a village nomine dignus. Looking at a garden in one of these larger hamlets, I notice that the hollyhock and pink and petunia are favourite flowers; and it is worth remarking that it is with flowers as with everything else--the imported articles are held in highest esteem. Writing once upon tobacco cultivation in the East, I remember noting that each province between Persia and Bengal imported its tobacco from its next neighbour on the west, and exported its own eastward. It struck me as a curious illustration of the universal fancy for "foreign" goods. So with flowers. It is very seldom that the wild plants of a locality arrive at the dignity of a garden. In England we sow larkspurs; in Utah they weed them out. In England we prize the passion-flower and the verbena; in Arkansas they carefully leave them outside their garden fences. And what splendid flowers these people scorn, simply because they grow wild! Some day, I expect, it will occur to some enterprising settler that there is a market abroad for his "weeds;" and that lily-bulbs and creeper-roots are not such rubbish as others think. Then Poplar Bluff, a crazy-looking place, with many of its houses built on piles, and a saloon that calls itself "the XIOU8 saloon." I tried to pronounce the name. Perhaps some one else can do it. Then the swamp reasserts itself, and the forest of oak and walnut, sycamore and plane. But the settlements are singularly devoid of trees, whether for fruit or shade. The people, I suppose, think there are too many about already.