STORM SCENE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. 129 
thunder grew more and more distinct, the lightning 
flashed more brightly, and an occasional gust of wind, 
accompanied by sleet, would penetrate between the logs 
that composed our shelter. 
An old wood-chopper, who made one of our party, 
feeling unusually comfortable, grew loquacious; and he 
detailed with great effect the woeful scenes he had been 
in at different times of his life, the most awful of which 
had been preceded, he said, by just such signs of weather 
as were then exhibiting themselves. 
Among other adventures, he had been wrecked while 
acting as a “hand” on a flat-boat navigating the Mis- 
SiSsippl. 
He said he had come all the way from Pittsburgh, 
at the head of the Ohio, to within two or three hundred 
miles of Orleans, without meeting with any other serious 
accident, than that of getting out of whiskey twice. 
But one night the captain of the flat-boat said that 
the weather was “crafty,” a thing he thought himself, as 
it was most too quiet to last long. 
After detailing several other particulars, he finished 
his story of being wrecked, as follows: ‘The quiet 
weather I spoke of, was followed by a sudden change; 
the river grew as rough as an alligator’s back; thar was 
the tallest kind of a noise overhead, and thé fire flew 
about up thar, like fur in a cat-fight. 
‘¢ We'll put in shore,’ said the captain ; and we tried 
to do it, that’s sartain; but the way in which we always 
6* 
