About ten o’clock in the forenoon the proprietor of the flatboat decided, as it was Sunday, to run into a bend of the river and tie up for the day.  That night the banks caved in so frequently that I was in danger of being entombed in my sneak-box; and I rejoiced when morning came and the dangerous quarters were left behind.  My flatboat companions made known to me a curious feature of river physics well known to the great floating population of the western streams.  If you start with a flat-boat or raft of timber from any point on the Ohio or Mississippi rivers at the moment a rise in the water takes place, and continue floating night and day without interruption, you will in a few days overrun the effects of the rise, or freshet, and get below it.  A little later you will discover, at some point a few hundred miles down-stream, that the river is just commencing to swell, as the result of the freshet upon which you originally started.

During Tuesday and Wednesday of January 11 and 12, I was at times with the flat, and at times miles away from it.  Near Skipwith Landing, Mississippi, we passed large and well-cultivated cotton-plantations, but the river country in its vicinity was almost a wilderness.

My sleep had been much broken by night-travelling, and about nine o’clock on Wednesday evening I fastened my boat to the flat, and determined to have two or three hours of refreshing slumber.  An hour’s peaceful rest followed, and then a snorting, screeching stern-wheel steamer crossed the river with its tow of barges, and demoralized all my surroundings, driving me against the flat, and shooting water over the deck of my craft.  Only half awake, I cast off from the flat, and thought that I was rowing down-river as usual; but I had dropped back into my nest just for one moment, and was in the land of Nod.  I felt in my sleep that I was floating down the Mississippi.  I was conscious that I had left the flatboat, and that steamers, snags, and eddies must be looked out for, or disaster would come quickly upon me.

I knew I was asleep, and tried to rouse myself.  I seemed to be watching the moon, which shone with silver glory upon the glistening waters, and made the dark forests, rising wall-like on the banks, even darker by comparison.  Then I seemed to enter the fields of astronomy, moving through the atmosphere still pulling at my oars.  My mental vision stretched across the Atlantic, and enveloped the old astronomical observatory of the French city of Toulouse.  It was the hour of sunset, and the learned Director Petit was at his post carefully adjusting his telescope, eager with the hope of identifying an undiscovered meteorite, the presence of which had been suggested by certain disturbances among the celestial bodies.  The savant carefully pointed his instrument to the neighboring regions of the setting sun, when suddenly I saw him start, and heard him mutter, like a philosopher of old, “Eureka, I have found it!” Only