ll started up the ten-mile
reach from Red River Landing to Fort Adams.

How swiftly and incessantly the scene changed. Down in a stateroom near
the boiler deck some beginner on the horn was dejectedly playing "A Life
on the Ocean Wave," but even with pestilence aboard and a brother
stricken with it what an exalted, exalting life was a life on this
mighty stream! Flat lands? Flat waters? It was the highest, widest
outlook into the world of nature and of man she had ever had.
Monotonous?--when one felt oneself a year older to-day than yesterday
and growing half a month's growth every hour? In yesterday's
childishness she had begun at Post Forty-six to keep count of all the
timber rafts and flatboats met, and here in this long stretch came three
more of the one and five of the other, with men hurrahing to her from
them--men as wild as the wilderness, yet with homes and families away
back up the great tributaries and their tributaries. And here were
mile-wide cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and
looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another
steamboat--and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly
frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told
to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and
plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall.
Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow
and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard"
shore was still Louisiana the "stabboard" was now her own native
Mississippi.

Yes, these wild shores were States--States of the great Union, the
world's hope; Jackson's, Clay's, Webster's Union, which "must and shall
be preserved," "now and forever, one and inseparable." Somewhere between
these shores, moreover, and not behind but away on up-stream, probably,
Mr. Watson said, in Dead Man's Bend, was, once more, the _Antelope_. In
the long wait at Bayou Sara, where Hugh and the outlandish Otto--who
could speak French--had found the priest while the commodore and the
mate were getting the doctor, the _Antelope_ had reappeared, swept up,
and foamed by, and now was so far ahead that in hardly less than another
hundred and sixty miles could she be again overtaken. But to Ramsey,
even without the _Antelope_ or any or all of the sights and facts of
landscape and history, no moment could go stale while the tale of
Phyllis and the _Quakeress_ wa