Though I had a bowing acquaintance with scores, only half-a-dozen or so people condescended to hold speech with me. The mention of these reminds me that one day one of my friends, named Newton Story, and myself were weighed in the scales, and while Story, a fine manly fellow, weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds, I was only ninety-five pounds,--within three pounds of seven stone. The frequency of ague attacks had reduced me to skin and bone. It was a strange disease, preceded by a violent shaking, and a congealed feeling as though the blood was suddenly iced, during which I had to be half-smothered in blankets, and surrounded by hot-water bottles. After a couple of hours’ shivering, a hot fit followed, accompanied by delirium, which, about the twelfth hour, was relieved by exhausting perspiration. When, about six hours later, I became cool and sane, my appetite was almost ravenous from quinine and emptiness. For three or four days afterwards, unless the fever was tertian, I went about my duties as before, when, suddenly, a fit of nausea would seize me, and again the violent malady overpowered me. Such was my experience of the agues of the Arkansas swamp-land; and, during the few months I remained at Cypress Bend, I suffered from them three times a month. The population of the State in that year (1861) was about 440,000; and I find, to my astonishment, that now (1895) it is over a million and a quarter, of whom only about 10,000 are foreign-born. Neither the dreadful ague, which exceeds in virulence the African type, nor the Civil War, has been able to check the population. What a hope for much-scorned Africa there is in these figures! But this is a digression due to my desire to be just to my bilious fellow-sufferers in the swamp-land. One of our new salesmen was famous as a violinist, and his favourite song and tune was about the ‘Arkansas Traveller,’ who, losing his way in one of the sloughy highways through the swamp, disappeared in the mud leaving his hat behind him to indicate the spot. Reflective people will see in this story another obstacle to social intercourse. Every new immigrant soon became infected with the proud and sensitive spirit prevailing in Arkansas. The poor American settler, the Irish employee, the German-Jew storekeeper, in a brief time grew as liable to bursts of deadly passion, or fits of cold-blooded malignity, as the Virginian aristocrat. In New Orleans, and other great cities, the social rule was to give and take, to assert an opinion, and hear it contradicted without resort to lethal weapons, but, in Arkansas, to refute a statement was tantamount to giving the lie direct, and was likely to be followed by an instant appeal to the revolver or bowie. Sometimes, an ‘_if_ you said so, then I said so,’ staved off the bloody arbitrament, but such folk were probably late immigrants and not old citizens.