Werner was sitting upon the narrow gallery which surrounded the Boiler-deck of the Diana,[24] and Schwarz had taken his seat beside him, on a green-varnished camp-stool, which he bent back as far as he could, in order to be enabled to plant his feet at the same time firmly against the nearest pillar. But the scenery of the Mississippi had materially changed since they had quitted the more southern climate of Louisiana. Those splendid, wide-spread plantations which pressed back the old forest far, far, into the blue distance, and from whose well-fenced fields the feather-like sugar-canes or the stubborn cotton-plants had hitherto met their gaze on the boundless plains on every side, were gone. And with them had disappeared those comfortably arranged planters' dwellings, embosomed in flowers, and orange and pomegranate trees; gone were the tulip and fig-trees; gone the dam on the water's edge, behind which numerous flocks had grazed, and upon which, now and then, the heads and broad-brimmed straw-hats of dark-eyed Creoles had been visible, who, reining in their ponies for awhile, had stopped to admire the speed of the steamer that dashed past them. The little showily-painted boats, with their gaudy flags, which, lower down, had enlivened the prospect, were no longer to be seen, and the forest, the tall, mighty, unconquered forest, overran the land, to the margin of the steep and crumbling shore, and often even beyond it, out into the eddying foaming flood. It was only here and there that, in some nook of the dark and silent woods, there stood the shanty of some solitary cordwood-cutter, around which a regular clearing was but rarely to be seen, and that, perhaps, scarcely fenced in; but, instead, high piles of cordwood, often several hundred yards in extent, testified to the industry of the labourer working there in solitude, and who was but rarely linked to a world from which he seemed to have fled by some steamer stopping here at distant intervals for wood. "But how can any one think of settling in such a melancholy, desolate place?" said Werner, breaking silence, at last, after a long pause, just as the Diana was heaving up the waves from her paddles towards the western shore, till they almost washed the threshold of a hut standing near--"the surrounding swamps must poison the air." "Certainly," opined Helldorf, "it is a melancholy life they lead who dwell here; but they chiefly view it as means to an end, and therefore put up with it for a year or two, or even for half-a-dozen years." "And for what end?" asked Werner. "To earn enough money to enable them to settle in a healthier district, and to buy some little property with what they earn here." "But why don't the people go to such a spot at once, when land can be had everywhere so readily, as you say; why do they risk having a sickly body when the 'far West' lies open to them, only waiting for the plough?"