“A fellow don’t always want company in the woods.  If you have a pardner, he ort to be jes like yourself, or you’ll be sartin to fall out.  I was riving out shingles and coopers’ stock once with a pardner, and times got mighty hard, sowe turned fishermen.  There was some piles standing in Plaquemine Bayou, and the drift stuff collected round them and made a sort of little island.  Me and Bill Bates went to work and rived out some lengths of cypress, and built a snug shanty on top of the piles.  As it wasn’t real estate we was on, nobody couldn’t drive us off; so we fished for the Plaquemine folks.

“By-and-by a king-snake swimmed over to our island, and tuck up his abode in a hole in a log.  The cuss got kind of affectionate, and after a while crawled right into our hut to catch flies and other varmin.  At last he got so tame he’d let me scratch his back.  Then he tuck to our moss bed, and used up a considerable portion of his time there.  Bill Bates hadn’t the manners of a hog, and he kept a-droppin’ hints to me, every few days, that he’d ’drap into that snake some night and squeeze the life out of him.’  This made me mad, and I nat’rally tuck the snake’s part, particularly as he would gobble up and crush the neck of every water-snake that cum ashore on our island.  One thing led to another, till Bill Bates swore he’d kill my snake.  Sez I to him, ‘Billum,’ (I always called him Billum when I meant bizness,) ’ef you hurt a hair of the head of my snake, I’ll hop on to you.’  That settled our pardnership.  Bill Bates knowed what I meant, and he gathered up his traps and skedaddled.

“Then I went to New Orleans, and out to Lake Pontchartrain, to fish for market.  A lot of cussed Chinese was in the bizness, and when they found coarse fish in their nets, they’d kill ’em and heave ’em overboard.  Now, no man’s got a rite to waste anything, so we fishermen begun to pay sum attention to the opium-smokers in good arnest.”

Here I interrupted the speaker to ask him if it would be safe for me to travel alone through the fishing-grounds of these Chinese.

“Oh, shucks! safe enuf now,” he answered.  “Once they was a bad set; but a change has cum over ’em—­they’re civilized now.”

A vision of schools and earnest missionary work was before me while I asked how their civilization had been accomplished.

“Shucks!  We dun it—­we white fishermen civilized ’em,” was the emphatic reply; “and not a bit too soon either, for the wasteful cusses got so bad they wasn’t satisfied with chucking dead fish overboard, but would go on to the prairies, and after using the grass cabins we white fishermen had built to go into in bad weather, the bloody furiners would burn them up to bother us.  They thort they’d drive us teetotally out of the diggins; so we thort it was time to civilize ’em.  We hid in the long grass fur a few nights and watched the cusses.  One morning a