The vow which the old sailor in the forecastle is forever making to go to sea no more, is rarely remembered over three days on land. And so it is with the cognate ideal which floats in the queer imagination of the old showman. I never knew but three or four who attained anything like the realization of their romantic purpose. Daniel Emmet--the author, I believe, of “Old Dan Tucker,” “Jordan,” and many of the best known of the earlier negro-melodies--did, toward the close of his life, so far reach the fleeting object of his bucolic ambition as to have a large, well-filled chicken-coop in the back yard of a rented house, in the suburbs of a great city. This sentimental regard for nature was vented by the members of the first companies with which I travelled in fishing and camping parties along the borders of the inland lakes. They would swallow most execrable amateur cooking during the day, but a night with beetles and mosquitoes would, as a general thing, drive them back willing captives into the arms of effete civilization. On the Floating Palace, Nature seemed to have taken us so closely to her bosom, in the wild lapse of those majestic rivers, that the romantic instinct of the oldest showman expressed itself oftenest in lazy expeditions to trap mocking-birds, or in listlessly dropping a line into the stream for cat-fish and soft-shelled turtles. The ladies of the profession are sometimes given to gossip and backbiting in as great a degree at least as are the gentlemen. Jealousy may be as rife on a Mississippi show-boat as in the antechamber of any court in Europe. I have known a _danseuse_ to furnish boys with clandestine bouquets to throw on the stage when she appeared; not that she cared at all for the praise or blame of the audience, but that she _did_ care to crush a cleverer rival. In our company on board the Palace and the Raymond we had strange contrasts in human nature. It would happen, for instance, that the man who could not sleep without snoring would be placed in the same state-room with the man who could not sleep within hearing of the most distant snore. The man who could not eat pork was seated at table just opposite the man who doted on it. We had one gentleman--the fleshy bass-singer already mentioned--who spent all his leisure in catching mocking-birds; and another, who passed his spare hours in contriving new and undiscoverable ways of letting these birds escape from the cages.