of this river may suddenly cut a new way across his estate inland at a distance of two miles from his home.  As the gradual change goes on, he looks from the windows of his house upon a new scene.  He no longer has the rapid flowing river, enlivened by the passage of steamboats and other craft; but before him is a sombre bayou, or crescent-shaped lake, whose muddy waters are almost motionless.  He was the proprietor of Needham’s Point, he is now the owner of Needham’s Island, and lives in the quiet atmosphere of the backwoods of Tennessee.

This day’s row carried me past heavily-wooded shores, cotton-fields with some of the cotton still unpicked; past the limits of Missouri on the left side, and into the wild state of Arkansas at Island No. 21.  I finally camped on Island No. 26, in a half submerged thicket, after a row of fifty-eight miles.

As there were many flat and shanty boats floating southward, I adopted a plan by means of which my dinners were frequently cooked with little trouble to myself or others.  About an hour before noon I gazed about within the narrow horizon for one of those floating habitations, and rowing alongside, engaged in conversation with its occupants.  The men would tell what success they had had in collecting the skins of wild animals (though silent upon the subject of pig-stealing), while the women would talk of the homes they had left, and sigh for the refinements and comforts of “city life,” by which they meant their former existence in some small town on the upper river.  While we were exchanging our budgets of information I would obtain the consent of the presiding goddess of the boat to stew my ambrosia upon her stove, the sneak-box floating the while alongside its tub-like companion.  Many a half hour was spent in this way; and, besides the comfort of a hot dinner, there were advantages afforded for the study of characters not to be found elsewhere.

These peculiar boats, so often encountered, found refuge in the frequent cut-offs behind the many islands of the river; for besides those islands which have been numbered, new ones are forming every year.  At times, when the water is very high, the current will cut a new route across the low isthmus, or neck, of a peninsula, around which sweeps a long reach of the main channel, leaving the tortuous bend which it has deserted to be gradually filled up with snags, deposits of alluvium, and finally to be carpeted with a vegetable growth.  In some cases, as the stream works away to the eastward or westward, it remains an inland crescent-shaped lake, numbers of which are to be found in the wilderness many miles from the parent stream.  I have known the channel of the Mississippi to be shortened twenty miles during a freshet, and a steam-boat which had followed the great ox-bow bend in ascending the river, on its return trip shot through the new cut-off of a few hundred feet in length, upon fifteen feet of water where a fortnight before a forest had been growing.