what sense of wonder and splendor--through
the eyes of the flatboatman or the swamper, the raftsman, the island
squatter, the trading-scow man, the runaway slave in the canebrake, the
woodyard man, or the "pirooter"--that degenerate heir, dwarfed to a
parasite, of the terrible, earlier-day land-pirates and river-wolves of
Plum Point and Crow's Nest Island? To such sorts, self-described as
human snapping-turtles and alligators, her peacock show of innumerable
lights was the jewelled crown of the only civilization they knew,
knowing it only with the same aloofness with which they knew the stars.
She woke them with the flutter of her wheels as of winged feet and
passed like a goddess using the river's points and islands for
stepping-stones, her bosom wrapped in a self-communion that gave no
least hint of its intolerable load of grief and strife.

Not until she entered the great bend of Vicksburg did she once come into
contrast with anything that could in any degree diminish her regal
supremacy. There, as day was breaking, she entered the deep shadow of
the southernmost "Walnut Hill." The town on its crest was two hundred
feet above her lower deck, and the stiff Yazoo squire, his kindly
brother-in-law and sister and the Vicksburg merchant and his wife,
waiting down there while she slowed up to the wharf-boat at its foot to
let them and others off, were proud of the bluff and of the two miles of
sister hills hid by it and the night. Even overproud they were. The two
husbands and wives silently wished for that lover of wonders, the
sleeping Ramsey, that they might enjoy her enjoyment of the sight, who,
though from exalted Natchez, never had beheld so vast an eminence or a
city stuck up quite so high.

But Ramsey, far removed in her new, sweet-smelling berth, did not stir
from a slumber into which she was throwing all the weight of an
overloaded experience. She was paying large back taxes to sleep and had
become so immersed in the transaction that her mother's rising,
dressing, and stealing away lifted, this time, not one of her eyelashes.
In not a sigh or motion did she respond to the long, quaking,
world-filling roar of the _Votaress's_ whistle, nor to John Courteney's
tolling of her great bell, nor to the jingle of lesser bells below, nor
to any stopping or reversing or new going ahead of her wheels either for
landing or for backing out and straightening up the river again. She
slept on though these were the very Walnut H