It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat called _Senator Cordill_ and we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. The wooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, and there were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee. Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon laid. “Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.