On the fifty-second day from Liverpool, the ‘Windermere’ anchored off one of the four mouths of the Mississippi River, in twenty-seven feet of water. The shore is called the Balize. Early next morning a small tug took our ship, and another of similar size, in tow, and proceeded up the river with us. We were kept very busy preparing the vessel for port, but I had abundant opportunities to note the strange shores, and the appearance of the greatest of American rivers. After several hours’ steaming, we passed ‘English turn,’ which Harry described as the place where the English were ‘licked’ by the Americans on the 8th of January, 1815--a story that was then incredible to me. After an ascent of about one hundred miles up the river, we came in view of the chief port of the Mississippi Valley, and, in due time, our vessel became one of three lying at a pier-head, pointing up among a seemingly countless number of ships and river-steamers, ranged below and above our berth. The boarding-house touts poured aboard and took possession of the sailors; and, before many minutes, Harry and I alone remained of the crew that had brought the big ‘Windermere’ across the sea to New Orleans. * * * * * Though about thirty-five years have elapsed since I first stood upon the levee of the Crescent City, scarcely one of all my tumultuous sensations of pleasure, wonder, and curiosity, has been forgotten by me. The levee sloped down with a noble breadth to the river, and stretched for miles up and down in front of the city, and was crowded with the cargoes of the hundreds of vessels which lay broadside to it. In some places the freights lay in mountainous heaps, but the barrels, and hogsheads, and cotton bales, covered immense spaces, though arranged in precise order; and, with the multitudes of men,--white, red, black, yellow,--horses, mules, and drays and wagons, the effect of such a scene, with its fierce activity and new atmosphere, upon a raw boy from St. Asaph, may be better imagined than described.