site of a village, or even a plantation, may disappear.
Not unfrequently, too, during the high spring-floods this eccentric
stream takes a "near cut" across the neck of one of its own "bends," and
in a few hours a channel is formed, through which pours the whole
current of the river. Perhaps a plantation may have been established in
the concavity of this bend,--perhaps three or four of them,--and the
planter who has gone to sleep under the full belief that he had built
his house upon a _continent_, awakes in the morning to find himself the
inhabitant of an island! With dismay he beholds the vast volume of
red-brown water rolling past, and cutting off his communication with the
mainland. He can no longer ride to his neighbouring village without the
aid of an expensive ferry. His wagons will no longer serve him to
"haul" to market his huge cotton-bales or hogsheads of sugar and
tobacco; and, prompted by a feeling of insecurity--lest the next wild
sweep of the current may carry himself, his house, and his several
hundred half-naked negroes along with it--he flees from his home, and
retires to some other part of the stream, where he may deem the land in
less danger of such unwelcome intrusion.

In consequence of these eccentricities a safe site for a town is
extremely rare upon the Lower Mississippi. There are but few points in
the last five hundred miles of its course where natural elevations offer
this advantage. The artificial embankment, known as the "Levee," has in
some measure remedied the deficiency, and rendered the towns and
plantations _comparatively_ secure.

As already stated, my hotel was somewhat out of the way. A boat might
touch at the landing and be off again without my being warned of it. A
down-river-boat, already laden, and not caring to obtain further
freight, would not stop long; and in a "tavern" upon the Mississippi you
must not confide in the punctuality of "Boots," as you would in a London
hotel. Your chances of being waked by Sambo, ten times sleepier than
yourself, are scarcely one in a hundred.

I had ample experience of this; and, fearing that the boat might pass if
I remained at the hotel, I came to the resolve to settle my affairs in
that quarter and at once transport myself and my _impedimenta_ to the
landing.

I should not be entirely without shelter. There was no house; but an
old steamboat, long since condemned as not "river-worthy," lay at the
landing. This hulk, moored b