1 10 LAKE PONTCIIARTKA1N. [CHAP XXVI. 



richer, never disposed to take his ease. In pursuing 

 this singular vocation, they who go southwards from 

 Virginia to North and South Carolina, and thence to 

 Georgia and Alabama, follow, as if by instinct, the 

 corresponding zones of country. The inhabitants of 

 the red soil of the granitic region keep to their oak 

 and hiccory, the &quot; crackers &quot; of the tertiary pine- 

 barrens to their light-wood, and they of the newest 

 geological formations in the sea-islands to their fish 

 and oysters. On reaching Texas, they are all of 

 them at fault, which will surprise no geologist who 

 has read Ferdinand Koemer s account of the form 

 which the cretaceous strata assume in that country, 

 consisting of a hard, compact, siliceous limestone, 

 which defies the decomposing action of the atmosphere, 

 and forms table-lands of bare rock, so entirely un 

 like the marls, clays, and sands of the same age in 

 Alabama. 



On going down from the cabin to the lower deck, I 

 found a slave-dealer with sixteen negroes to sell, most 

 of them Virginians. I heard him decline an offer of 500 

 dollars for one of them, a price which he said he could 

 have got for the man before he left his own State. 



Next morning at daylight, we found ourselves in 

 Louisiana. We had already entered the large la 

 goon, called Lake Pontchartrain, by a narrow pas 

 sage, and, having skirted its southern shore, had 

 reached a point six miles north of New Orleans. 

 Here we disembarked, and entered the cars of a rail 

 way built on piles, which conveyed us in less than an 

 hour to the great city, passing over swamps in which 

 the tall cypress, hung with Spanish moss, was flou- 



