UP STKEAM: ON THE RED RIVER. 371 



as we went on board the steamer, of the hurrahs 

 shouted after us from the quay by a few dozen sailors, 

 or the waving of the star-spangled banners that flut- 

 tered over the poop and forecastle of all the honour 

 and glory, in short, attending our departure. I was 

 busy drawing a comparison between my first and this, 

 my last, voyage to the Eed Eiver. 



It was just nine years and two months since I had 

 first come into possession of my " freehold of these 

 United States," as the papers specified it. Five 

 thousand dollars had procured me the honour of 

 becoming a Louisianian planter ; upon the occurrence 

 of which event, I was greeted by my friends and 

 acquaintances as the luckiest of men. There were 

 two thousand acres, " with due allowance for fences 

 and roads," according to the usual formula ; and the 

 wood alone, if I might believe what was told me, 

 was well worth twenty thousand dollars. For the 

 preceding six months, the whole of the Western press 

 had been praising the Eed Eiver territory to the very 

 skies ; it was an incomparable sugar and cotton ground, 

 full sixteen feet deep of river slime Egypt was a 

 sandy desert compared to it and as to the climate, 

 the zephyrs that disported themselves there were only 

 to be paralleled in Eldorado and Arcadia. I, like a 

 ninny as I was, although fully aware of the puffing 

 propensities of our newspaper editors, especially when 

 their tongues, or rather pens, have been oiled by a 

 few handfuls of dollars, fell into the trap, and pur- 



