From New Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetness which rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in the _pralines_ on which New Orleans prides itself. A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide. The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and calls sharply to the workers in French _patois_. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.