at the bottle!  It’s prime stuff, I tell ye; will kill a man at forty paces,” &c.  The rusty stove was as strong an attraction as the quiet crew, as I thought how convenient it would be to run alongside of the old boat and utilize it for my culinary purposes.  The unwonted silence, however, proved conclusively that some refined instinct, unknown to the usual crews of such boats, governed these voyagers, and I feared to intrude upon so dignified a party.

Descending a long straight reach, after making a run of twenty-three miles, I crossed the limits of Kentucky, and, entering Tennessee, saw on its shore, in a deep bend of the river, the site of a fortification, while opposite to it lay the low Island No. 10.  Both of these places were full of interest, being the scenes of conflict in our civil war.  The little white sneak-box glided down another long bend, over the wrecks of seven steamboats, and passed New Madrid, on the Missouri shore.  The mouth of Reelfoot Bayou then opened before me, a creek which conducts the waters from the weird recesses of one of the most interesting lakes in America,—­a lake which was the immediate result of a disastrous series of disturbances generally referred to as the New Madrid earthquakes, and which took place in 1811-13.  Much of the country in the vicinity of New Madrid and Fort Donaldson was involved in these serious shocks.  Swamps were upheaved and converted into dry uplands, while cultivated uplands were depressed below the average water level, and became swamps or ponds of water.  ’The inhabitants, deprived of their little farms, were reduced to such a stage of suffering as to call for aid from government, and new lands were granted them in place of their fields which had sunk out of sight.  Hundreds of square miles of territory were lost during the two years of terrestrial convulsions.

The most interesting effect of the subsidence of the land was the creation of Reelfoot Lake, the fluvial entrance to which is from the tortuous Mississippi some forty-five miles below Hickman, Kentucky.  The northern portion of the lake is west of and a short distance from Fort Donaldson, about twenty miles from Hickman, by the river route.  As Reelfoot Lake possesses the peculiar flora and characteristics of a multitude of other swamp-lakes throughout the wilderness of the lower Mississippi valley, I cannot better describe them all than by giving to the reader a description of that lake, written by an intelligent observer who visited the locality in 1874.

“Nothing,” he says, “could well exceed the singularity of the view that meets the eye as one comes out of the shadows of the forest on to the border of this sheet of water.  From the marshy shore spreads out the vast extent of the seemingly level carpet of vegetation,—­a mat of plants, studded over with a host of beautiful flowers; through this green prairie runs a maze of water-ways, some just wide enough for a pirogue, some widening into