At intervals I caught glimpses of negro cabins, with their clearings, and their little crops of cotton glistening in the sun.  The island tow-heads and sand-bars were numerous, and in places the Mississippi broadened into lake-like areas, while the yellow current, now heavily charged with mud, arose in height every hour.  The climate was growing delightful.  It was like a June day in the northern states.  Each soft breeze of the balmy atmosphere seemed to say, as I felt its strange, fascinating influence, “You are nearing the goal!” The shadows of the twilight found me safely ensconced behind the lower end of Island No. 33, where in the bayou between it and the Tennessee shore I lazily watched fair Luna softly emerging from the clouds, and lending to the grand old woods her tender light.

I proceeded southward the next day, rowing comfortably after having divested myself of all superfluous apparel.  The negroes, on their one-horse plantations, gave a hearty hail as I passed, but I noted here a feature I had remarked when upon my “Voyage of the Paper Canoe,” on the eastern coast.  It was the silence in which these people worked.  The merry song of the darky was no longer heard as in the “auld lang syne.”  Then he was the slave of a white master.  Now he is the slave of responsibilities and cares which press heavily upon his heretofore unthinking nature.  To-day he has a future if he can make it.

During the day, a lone woman on a shanty-boat, which was securely fastened to an old stump, volunteered much information in regard “her man,” and the money he expected to receive for the skins he had been collecting during the winter.  She said he would get in New Orleans thirty-five cents apiece for his coon-skins, one dollar for minks, and one dollar and a half each for beaver and otter skins.  She informed me that the sunken country below Memphis, on the Arkansas side, was full of deer and bears.

By rowing briskly I was able to pass Memphis, the principal river port of Tennessee, at five o’clock in the afternoon.  This flourishing city is situated upon one of the Chickasaw bluffs, thirty feet above the river.  At the base of the bluff a bed of sandstone projects into the water, it being the only known stratum of rock along the river between Cairo and the Gulf.  From the Ohio River to Vicksburg, a distance of six hundred miles, it is asserted that there is no other site for a commercial city:  so Memphis, though isolated, enjoys this advantage, which has, in fact, made her the busy cotton-shipping port she is to-day.  Her population is about forty thousand.  As Memphis is connected by railroads with the towns and villages of all the back country, in addition to her water advantages, she may be called the business centre of an immense area of cultivated land.  The view of the city from the river is striking.  Her esplanade, several hundred feet in width, sweeps along the bluffs and is covered with large warehouses.