66 66 They belching floods of water over me. "struck their jaws together so close to my ears, "as almost to stun me, and as I expected every "moment to be dragged out of the boats and instantly devoured, I made for the shore, as "the only means left me for my preservation." "'* We employed ourselves also in looking out for what the navigators call planters and sawyers. The former are trees which, floating down the river, have fixed themselves at the bottom, with their tops pointing up the stream, and often concealed under water. The sawyers are trees, which have carried with them a large mass of earth, when detached from the bank, by the weight of which the roots are kept at the bottom of the river, while the top, pointing down the stream, preserves a vibrating motion, as the pressure of the current, and the reaction of the weight at the roots, alternately elevate and depress it. Bradbury observes, "that the period " of its oscillatory motion is sometimes of several "minutes duration. The steersman this instant sees all the surface of the river smooth and 66 66 tranquil, and the next he is struck with horror * This account appears to partake a little of the marvellous, as the alligator has in no country been known so fierce. According to the accounts of the travellers most deserving of credit, they will seize by surprise, but not attack openly. 66 on seeing the sawyer before him raising his "terrific arms, and so near that neither strength "nor skill can save his vessel from destruction." On my arrival at Natchez, I took up my abode at a comfortable boarding-house in the upper town; the lower town being a perfect Wapping, crowded with Kentucky boats, and an odd miscellaneous population of back-woodsmen and others from the western country, Letter X. Natchez, 6th May, 1820. AT the boarding-house, I found the Governor of the State, a worthy old gentleman, of handsome property, and of a highly respectable family in Virginia. He took his meals at the common table, where there was a promiscuous assemblage of merchants, agents, and clerks; and I kept my letter of introduction to him in my pocket two days, little aware that I was in his company. I mention this circumstance, as a trait of the manners of this part of the country, which surprised me a little, as I had met at Washington Governors of other States, with far less solid titles to personal and hereditary respectability, aristocratical enough in their behaviour. When I had delivered my letters to him, he insisted on sending his servant and horses with me in my calls on some of the principal planters in the neighbourhood; for the roads through the forests are intricate, and we seldom meet any one to set us right, if we take a wrong direction. The black servant began to talk to me on the road about England, 66 an English hunter which he had once seen having impressed his imagination strongly. He spoke of my country for a long time, as if he was very familiar with it. On finding, however, that we did not grow Indian corn, he thought it must be a strange place; and asked with surprise, if England was not at Philadelphia; and when I assured him it was 3000 miles across the sea, he exclaimed, "Possible! well, I always thought England was at Philadelphia." Our boarding-house is near the Mississippi, which is now falling a foot every day; the spring flood having reached its height while I was at New Orleans; but the flood from the Missouri has not yet arrived. Nearly opposite the windows of the room in which I am writing, the river takes one of its noblest sweeps, under what are called the Bluffs, from which you look down over it upon a dense forest, which stretches to the horizon, and in which the sun seems to extinguish his latest rays. On these Bluffs I generally take my evening walk, and please myself with the idea that a few hours previously you may have been watching the setting of this glorious luminary behind our favourite hills; for in "These lands, beneath Hesperian skies, "Our daylight sojourns till your morrow rise.” Indeed, there is something in the vicinity of Natchez which perpetually reminds me of home. The thick clover, the scattered knolls, with their wood-crowned summits, differing only from those most familiar to me in the magnificence of the foliage with which they are shaded, and the neat husbandry of the intervening plantations, give the whole country the appearance of an English park. An Irishman, with whom I was riding last night, remarked, that the roads. strongly resemble those through the large domains in Ireland. I leave you to make due allowance for our anxiety to trace every little resemblance to our native land. At this distance from home, we are not solicitous, by too accurate a discrimination, to dispel an illusion, if it be one, which affords us so much pleasure. You remember Humboldt's beautiful observation: "If amid this exotic nature, the "lowing of a cow, or the roaring of a bull, were "heard from the depth of a valley, the remem“brance of our country was awakened suddenly "at the sound. They were like distant voices resounding from beyond the ocean, and with magical force transporting us from one hemisphere to the other." But the gigantic Plane and Maple trees, a large proportion of the seventy or eighty different species of the American Oak, 66 66 66 66 |