Except this amusing conversation, and a commendable regularity at meals, I can think of no activity whatever on the part of the Governor while with us,--save only that he did two things: the first was to get knocked through the door of the concert-room, as before mentioned; and the second was to write up for our daily newspaper, the Palace Journal, a most brilliant account of the curiosities in the museum. The picturesque joy with which, in that series of articles, he would pursue the history of some bogus war-club through the hands and over the heads of whole dynasties of savage kings; the sunny sea voyages upon which he would send his adventurous rhetoric to far tropic islands after some insignificant shell, which, perhaps, was in reality captured in the neighborhood of Long Branch; the fearful and bloody deeds of midnight assassins that he would group about some old rusty sheaf-knife, which was curious only because it had been rusted to order by chemicals; and then the melting tenderness in which his soul would go out in the heart history of our wax figures,--especially of that stolid, blue-eyed lady in excessive black lashes and pink cheeks, who had been bought with an odd lot from an old collection at Albany, and attired in cheap gauze and labelled “The Empress Josephine,”--these delightful arabesques of invention and sentiment, and, in a word, any of the Governor’s fine literary pyrotechnics may not be reproduced. They have gone down with the last files of the Palace Journal, who shall say in what Western Lethe? And yet I have the bad taste to own that, for my own reading, I would rather come across that series of descriptive articles now than upon the lost books of Livy. The Governor fairly revelled in his work. Indeed, my last memory of him is as I saw him, with his lead-pencil in his hand and indefinite foolscap before him, sprawled out upon his stomach on the floor of the museum, one forenoon when there was no exhibition. He was staring, in a fine frenzy, straight into the distended mouth and merry glass eyes of our stuffed alligator; in the act, no doubt, was the ecstatic Governor of inventing and composing details of the heart-rending tragedy of the last man swallowed by the smiling, convivial saurian before him. And there I shall leave him. CHAPTER VIII. WILD LIFE. I obtained my first view of the great Mississippi and of the practical working of Lynch law at the same time. The night of our advent at Cairo was lit up by the fires of an execution.