We had anticipated regaling ourselves with the juicy humps of the buffaloes which we should kill, but although we had entered the very heart of their great pasture-land, we had not met with one, nor even with a ground-hog; a snake, or a frog.  One evening, the pangs of hunger became so sharp that we were obliged to chew tobacco and pieces of leather to allay our cravings; and we determined that if, the next day at sunset we had no better fortune, we would draw lots to kill one of our horses.  That evening we could not sleep, and as murmuring was of no avail, the divine entertained us with a Texan story, just, as he said, to pump the superfluous air out of his body.  I shall give it in his own terms:—­

“Well, I was coming down the Wabash River (Indiana), when, as it happens nine times out of ten, the steam-boat got aground, and that so firmly, that there was no hope of her floating again till the next flood; so I took my wallet, waded for two hundred yards, with the water to my knees, till I got safe on shore, upon a thick-timbered bank, full of rattle-snakes, thorns of the locust-tree, and spiders’ webs, so strong, that I was obliged to cut them with my nose, to clear the way before me.  I soon got so entangled by the vines and the briars that I thought I had better turn my back to the stream till I should get to the upland, which I could now and then perceive through the clearings opened between the trees by recent thunder-storms.  Unhappily, between the upland and the little ridge on which I stood there was a wide river bottom[24], into which I had scarcely advanced fifty yards when I got bogged.  Well, it took me a long while to get out of my miry hole, where I was as fast as a swine in its Arkansas sty; and then I looked about for my wallet, which I had dropped.  I could see which way it had gone, for, close to the yawning circle from which I had just extricated myself, there was another smaller one two yards off, into which my wallet had sunk deep, though it was comfortably light; which goes to illustrate the Indiana saying, that there is no conscience so light but will sink in the bottom of the Wabash.  Well, I did not care much, as in my wallet I had only an old coloured shirt and a dozen of my own sermons, which I knew by heart, having repeated them a hundred times over.

[Footnote 24:  River bottom is a space, sometimes of many miles in width, on the side of the river, running parallel with it.  It is always very valuable and productive land, but unhealthy, and dangerous to cross, from its boggy nature.]

“Being now in a regular fix, I cut a stick, and began wittling and whistling, to lighten my sorrows, till at last I perceived at the bank of the river, and five hundred yards ahead, one of those large rafts, constructed pretty much like Noah’s ark, in which a Wabash farmer embarks his cargo of women and fleas, pigs and chickens, corn, whisky, rats, sheep, and stolen niggers; indeed, in most cases, the whole of the cargo is stolen, except the wife and children, the only portion whom the owner would very much like to be rid of; but these will stick to him as naturally as a prairie fly to a horse, as long as he has spirits to drink, pigs to attend to, and breeches to mend.