Life on the Mississippi eBook

houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them.  The properties of multitudes of people were under water for months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting description of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans times-democrat’s relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks still under water.

Chapter 27 Some Imported Articles

We met two steamboats at New Madrid.  Two steamboats in sight at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi.  The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive—­and depressing.  League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day—­and still the same, night after night and day after day—­majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy—­symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!

Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America, from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of them—­a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the land during many, many years.  Each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book—­a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors.  A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then.  The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern, of course; they had to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from one’s predecessors.  And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.  Captain Basil Hall.  R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says—­

’Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything.  But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times, that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.’