Our wanderings from city to city, steamer to steamer, and store to store, which the business of my father necessitated, I do not propose to dwell upon; in fact, it would be impossible to contain within a volume all that I remember of this, and subsequent periods. I am more concerned with the personal element, the cardinal incidents, and the tracing of my growth to maturity. Besides, the banks of the Mississippi and its lower tributaries have little to recommend them to a youngster after the first expressive Oh! of admiration. The planters’ mansions, the settlements, and cities, are mainly of uniform colour and style of architecture. When we have seen one mansion, settlement, or city, we seem to have seen all. One river-bank is like the other. The houses are either of wood with a verandah, and painted, or of red brick; there is a church spire here, and, there, a mass of buildings; but presently, after a second view, there is as little of lasting interest as in the monotonous shores of the great river. I only record such incidents as affected me, and such as clearly stand out conspicuously in the retrospect, which have been not only a delight to memory, but which I am incapable of forgetting. During nearly two years, we travelled several times between New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville; but most of our time was spent on the lower Mississippi tributaries, and on the shores of the Washita, Saline, and Arkansas Rivers, as the more profitable commissions were gained in dealings with country merchants between Harrisonburg and Arkadelphia, and between Napoleon and Little Rock. From these business tours I acquired a better geographical knowledge than any amount of school-teaching would have given me; and at one time I was profound in the statistics relating to population, commerce, and navigation of the Southern and South-Western States. Just as Macaulay was said to be remarkable for being able to know a book from beginning to end by merely turning over its pages, I was considered a prodigy by my father and his intimate friends for the way names and faces clung to my memory. I could tell the name of every steamer we had passed, the characteristics of her structure, and every type of man we met. A thing viewed, or a subject discussed likely to be useful, became impressed indelibly on the mind. Probably this mental acquisitiveness was stimulated by the idea that it formed the equipment of a merchant, which I believed it was my ultimate destiny to be; and that every living man should be a living gazetteer, and possess facts and figures at his fingers’ ends. Meantime, my memory was frequently of great use to my father as an auxiliary to his memorandum-book of shipments, purchases, and sales. Once having seen the page, I could repeat its record with confidence; and I was often rewarded by his admiring exclamation, ‘Well, I never heard the like! It is perfectly astonishing how you remember details,’ etc. But, though