acres just as readily as
they did their thousands of towns and villages in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
and Michigan, and their tens of thousands of shares in banks and railways.
It was a speculative fever, which has since, we may hope, been in some
degree cured. At any rate, the remedies applied have been tolerably severe.

I had not escaped the contagion, and, having got the land on paper, I
thought I should like to see it in dirty acres; so, in company with a
friend who had a similar venture, I embarked at Baltimore on board the
Catcher schooner, and, after a three weeks' voyage, arrived in Galveston
Bay.

The grassy shores of this bay, into which the river Brazos empties itself,
rise so little above the surface of the water, to which they bear a strong
resemblance in colour, that it would be difficult to discover them, were
it not for three stunted trees growing on the western extremity of a long
lizard-shaped island that stretches nearly sixty miles across the bay, and
conceals the mouth of the river. These trees are the only landmark for the
mariner; and, with their exception, not a single object--not a hill, a
house, nor so much as a bush, relieves the level sameness of the island
and adjacent continent.

After we had, with some difficulty, got on the inner side of the island, a
pilot came on board and took charge of the vessel. The first thing he did
was to run us on a sandbank, off which we got with no small labour, and by
the united exertions of sailors and passengers, and at length entered the
river. In our impatience to land, I and my friend left the schooner in a
cockleshell of a boat, which upset in the surge, and we found ourselves
floundering in the water. Luckily it was not very deep, and we escaped
with a thorough drenching.

When we had scrambled on shore, we gazed about us for some time before we
could persuade ourselves that we were actually upon land. It was, without
exception, the strangest coast we had ever seen, and there was scarcely a
possibility of distinguishing the boundary between earth and water. The
green grass grew down to the edge of the green sea, and there was only the
streak of white foam left by the latter upon the former to serve as a line
of demarcation. Before us was a plain, a hundred or more miles in extent,
covered with long, fine grass, rolling in waves before each puff of the
sea-breeze, with neither tree, nor house, nor hill, to vary the monotony
of the surface. Ten or twe