“There is something of forgetfulness in such a scene, a sense of a world far away, with no path back to it.  One might fall to eating our Wampapin lily, as did the Chickasaws of old, and find in it the all-forgetting lotus, for it is, indeed, the brother of the lotus of the Nile.  We do not know how far these forgotten savages found the mystic influence of the Nilotic lotus in these queenly flowers of the swamps, but tradition says that they ate not only the seeds, but the bulbous roots, which the natives aver are quite edible.  So we, too, can claim a lotus-eating race, and are even able to try the soul-subduing powers of the plant at our will.

“There is something in the weight of life and death in these swamps that subdues the mind, and makes the steps we take fall as in a dream.  It was not easy to fix a basis for memory with the pencil, and recollection shapes a vast sensation of strangeness, a feeling as if one had trod for a moment beyond the brink of time, rather than any distinct images.”

At sunset I came upon Joe Eckel’s Bar,—­not the fluvial establishment so much resorted to by people ashore,—­but a genuine Mississippi sandbar, or shoal, which was covered with two feet of water, and afforded lodgment for a heavy raft of trees that had floated upon it.  The island was also partly submerged, but I found a cove with a sandy beach on its lower end; and running into the little bay, I staked the boat in one foot of water, much to the annoyance of flocks of wild-fowl which circled about me at intervals all night.  The current had been turbid during the day, and to supply myself with drinking-water it was necessary to fill a can from the river and wait for the sediment to precipitate itself before it was fit for use.  Fifty-six miles were logged for the day’s row.

In the morning Joe Eckel’s Bar was alive with geese and ducks, cackling a lusty farewell as I pushed through the drift stuff and resumed my voyage down the swelling river.

The reaches were usually five miles in length, though some of them were very much longer.  Sometimes deposits of sand and vegetable matter will build up a small island adjacent to a large one, and then a dense thicket of cotton-wood brush takes possession of it, and assists materially in resisting the encroachments of the current.  These little, low islands, covered with thickets, are called tow-heads, and the maps of the Engineer Corps of the United States distinguish them from the originally numbered islands in the following manner:  “Island No. 18,” and “Tow Head of Island No.18.”

In addition to the numbered islands, which commence with Island No. 1, below the mouth of the Ohio, and end with Island No. 125, above the inlet to Bayou La Fourche, in Louisiana, there are many which have been named after their owners.  During one generation a planter may live upon a peninsula comprising many thousand acres, with his cotton-fields and houses fronting on the Mississippi.  The treacherous current