At length a keel boat came in from the Illinois Saline, commanded by a Captain Ensminger--an Americo-German--a bold, frank man, very intelligent of things relating to river navigation. With him I took passage for St. Louis, in Missouri, and we were soon under weigh, by the force of oars, for the mouth of the Ohio. We stopped a short time at a new hamlet on the Illinois shore, which had been laid out by some speculators of Cincinnati, but was remarkable for nothing but its name. It was called, by a kind of bathos in nomenclature, "America." I observed on the shores of the river at this place, a very recent formation of pudding-stone, or rather a local stratum of indurated pebbles and clay, in which the cementing ingredient was the oxyde of iron. Chalybeate waters percolated over and amongst this mass. This was the last glimpse of consolidated matter. All below, and indeed far above, was alluvial, or of recent origin. Nothing could exceed the fertile character of the soil, or its rank vegetation and forest growth, as we approached the point of junction; but it was a region subject to periodical overflows, the eras of which were very distinctly marked by tufts and bunches of grass, limbs, and other floating matter which had been lodged and left in the forks and branches of trees, now fifteen or twenty feet above our heads. It was now the first day of July, and I felt the most intense interest as we approached and came to the point of confluence. I had followed the Ohio, in all its sinuosities, a thousand miles. I had spent more than three months in its beautiful and varied valley; and I had something of the attachment of an old friend for its noble volume, and did not well like to see it about to be lost in the mighty Mississippi. Broad and ample as it was, however, bringing in the whole congregated drain of the western slopes of the Alleghanies and the table lands of the Great Lakes, the contest was soon decided. The stream had, at that season, sunk down to its summer level, and exhibited a transparent blue volume. The Mississippi, on the contrary, was swelled by the melting snows of the Rocky Mountains, and was in its vernal flood. Coming in at rather an acute angle, it does not immediately arrest the former, but throws its waters along the Tennessee shores. It runs with prodigious velocity. Its waters are thick, turbid, and replete with mingled and floating masses of sand and other comminuted rock and floating vegetation, trees, and rubbish. For miles the line of separation between the Ohio and Mississippi waters was visible by its colour; but long before it reaches the Iron Banks, the modern site of Memphis--the Father of Waters, as it is poetically, not literally, called--had prevailed, and held on its way to make new conquests of the St. Francis, the White, the Arkansas, and other noble streams.